Rate My Professor Stephen Bokenkamp

Stephen R. Bokenkamp is an Emeritus Regents' Professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures and an Emeritus Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Specializing in medieval Chinese Daoism, with particular emphasis on its literatures and relations with Buddhism, Bokenkamp has made foundational contributions to the understanding of early Daoist scriptures and Chinese religious history. He earned his Ph.D. in Classical Chinese Language from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 with a dissertation on T'ang fu poetry, an M.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley in 1981, and a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from George Washington University in 1976. His academic career spans several institutions: Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Committee on Asian Studies at the University of Tennessee (1987–1989), Assistant Professor and later Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University (1989–2007), and Professor and Regents' Professor at Arizona State University since 2007.

Bokenkamp's major publications include the award-winning Early Daoist Scriptures (University of California Press, 1997), which received the Philip E. Lilienthal Book Award; Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China (University of California Press, 2007); and Daojiao yanjiu lunji (Zhongxi shuju, 2015). He has authored numerous influential articles, such as 'The Early Lingbao Scriptures and the Origins of Chinese Monasticism' (2011), 'Sisters of the Blood: The Lives of the Daoist Nuns Behind the Xie Ziran Biography' (2016), and contributions to volumes like the Cambridge History of China. His honors encompass a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2012) for translating Declarations of the Perfected, President's Carnegie Fellowship (2014), Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Fellowships (2008, 2018), Edwin C. and Elizabeth A. Whitehead Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (2018), and visiting fellowships at the Australian National University (1999) and Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (2017). A conference in his honor, 'Scripture, Community, and Canon in Early Daoism,' was organized by former students at Princeton University in 2017. Bokenkamp's meticulous translations and analyses have profoundly impacted scholarship on Daoist ritual, poetry, and its interplay with Buddhism.