Rate My Professor Nick Williams

Nicholas Morrow Williams is Professor of Chinese Literature and Faculty Head of the East & Southeast Asian Section in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University, a position he assumed as full Professor in 2025, following his tenure as Associate Professor from 2021 to 2025. He earned his A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 2003, M.A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Washington in 2006, and Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from the University of Washington in 2010. Williams's career trajectory includes serving as Associate Professor (2019–2021) and Assistant Professor (2016–2019) of Chinese Literature at the University of Hong Kong's School of Chinese; Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology (2015–2016), where he was also Associate Editor of the Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology; Research Assistant Professor at HKBU's Sino-Humanitas Institute (2012–2015); and Assistant Professor of Translation and Literature at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2010–2012).

His research specializations encompass medieval Chinese poetry, shamanistic religious influences on the Chinese literary tradition, Buddhist thought, rhetoric, translation, and comparative religion in East Asia, with particular emphasis on the Chuci, the fu genre, Kūkai’s writings, and Tang poetry. Key publications include his monographs Imitations of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics (Brill, 2015) and Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning: Shamanistic Religious Influences on Chinese Literary Tradition (Cambria Press, 2022); translations such as Elegies of Chu: An Anthology of Early Chinese Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2022); and the forthcoming Dialogues in the Dark: Interpreting the Heavenly Questions across Two Millennia (Harvard University Asia Center, 2025). Selected articles are “Translating the Esoteric: On the Chinese Translation and Commentary of the Mahāvairocana sūtra, with Special Reference to the Reinterpretation of Kalpa” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2024), “Beyond Arbitrariness: Kūkai’s Theory of Languages and Scripts” (Journal of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, 2021), and “A Constant Cascade: Ancient and Medieval Verse on the Four Waterways” (Religions, 2022). Williams has garnered major awards including the Hakuho Foundation Japanese Research Fellowship (2019, 12 months), General Research Fund grants (2018, 2015), Fulbright scholarship for dissertation research (2007), and others. He currently edits Tang Studies, has supervised multiple Ph.D. students to completion, and teaches courses like CHI 514 Advanced Classical Chinese, CHI 434 Buddhist Poetry, and CHI 598 Tang Prosody Seminar at ASU.