Announcement of Faculty Tenure, Effective Fall, 2017

This article first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 17, Winter 2017.

Rod Campbell
Assistant Professor of East Asian Archaeology and History

A man stands and looks at the camera. He holds a magnifying glass in one hand. To his side there is a large table covered with artifacts, tools, and boxes. I would like to thank the faculty of ISAW for supporting my tenure case and especially former director Roger Bagnall for his mentorship. I intend to pursue three major research projects over the next five to ten years. The first is a historiographic book-length investigation into the construction of the Shang dynasty as a historical subject, tackling issues of scale, narrative, as well as the fragmentary and frequently incommensurable nature of its sources. The second is a new theory of Early Chinese visual culture, combining both cultural holistic and formalist approaches with a more contemporary anthropological perspective. If I am correct, it will change the way Early Chinese art is understood. The goal of the third project is to shed light on the economy of North China at the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. With fieldwork underway on the capital at Anyang, the only excavated contemporaneous village and the longest excavated Shang secondary center, we have an ideal comparative set and have already made some exciting discoveries.