Maddalena Poli

Maddalena Poli earned her Ph.D. from theDepartment of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. The primary sources she works with are manuscripts produced during the Warring States era (457 – 221 BCE), a crucial moment in the formation of ancient Chinese literature. In particular, she focuses on what manuscripts tell us about educational practices during the last centuries BCE, and how ideas developed and spread at the time. She co-authored articles on ancient manuscripts of recent discovery and their impact on the formation of classics such as the Book of Odes (see her “Establishing the text of the Odes”) and the Analects (see her  New Manuscript Evidence on the Formation of the Analects, in Early China vol. 47). Her next forthcoming paper is a study of literary representations of the famous ancient minister Fu Yue across textual sources. Her forthcoming book, Political Writings in Ancient China, is a study of six Warring States manuscripts preserved at Tsinghua University. Maddalena has a strong commitment to promote open-access scholarship, and has written for the Digital Orientalist, Manuscript Studies (forthcoming May 2025), and the DRH. 

Before joining Yale as MacMillan Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies, Maddalena taught at Pomona College several courses on premodern Chinese history, such as A Culinary History of China, Confucius and his Interpreters, and The Many Lives of Confucius. You can find syllabi and course reviews at maddalenapoli.com.