Stanford Humanities Center
Sophia is a senior from Shanghai, China, majoring in classics and minoring in archaeology. Growing up between the U.S. and China, she has always been interested in exploring how the two cultures converge and diverge, in their present iterations as well as in their historical influences. She has been gifted many opportunities at Stanford, from spending a month on a boat in the South Pacific to participating in underwater archaeology in the Mediterranean.
SHC Project
Corresponding in Crisis: Comparing the Letters of Cicero and Sima Qian
Advisor: Christopher Krebs
What is the focus of your current research?
I am exploring how Cicero and Sima Qian achieved self-fashioning through the medium of letters, especially in reference to their respective crises of exile and castration. Although physically and culturally far apart in Late Republican Rome and Han Dynasty China, the two literary masters contended with strikingly similar life paths—they worked their way up political ranks, were disempowered by socio-political authorities, then attempted to reestablish their legacies through their writing. I will try to understand how they worked to reconcile their periods of disempowerment and fashion their selves to encompass their crises in their letters.
What drew you to this topic?
The names Cicero and Sima Qian have been ubiquitous in my studies, associated with the “canon” and their impressive (and quite literal) magna opera. Yet, when I read their letters for the first time, it felt like catching a glimpse of the men as they were before the millennia of acclaim. Reading more closely and extensively, it is clear that letters were not what we now consider private correspondence to be, but bridged the private and public, serving a critical role in maintaining relationships and personal safety in their political spheres. Meeting these men anew in their troubles and friendships brings humanity to their words.
How are you conducting your research?
Through close reading of the primary texts in Latin and Classical Chinese I will try to understand how the word use and rhetorical form contribute to the content of the letters. I will contextualize the two men and their writings in their socio-political histories, consult intensively the secondary scholarship since antiquity to recognize modern biases. I will employ the framework of self-fashioning from Greenblatt, consult ancient epistolary theories, and use theories of comparative literature.
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
Although so far apart in geography and culture, when I attempt to place the two men in dialogue, they somehow seem to speak mutually intelligibly, in a metaphorical sense of course. Their anxieties and friendships, their belief in their work, and how they risked their lives to convince themselves and others (including us today) that their efforts matter, all reach across immeasurable distance into one conversation.
In your view, why is it valuable to study this topic?
I think it is important to think about the people behind texts and to recognize the humanity behind what is sometimes held as unassailable literature or, conversely, “dead” languages. Since I started my research, every day, in each letter, I find shared moments with these alien cultures in abstract things like love and death, but also in the small turns of phrases that make love and death concrete. More generally, studying classics has taught me to appreciate what we share in common and to explore where we diverge.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
I have spent so much time since high school studying the works of Cicero, but reading extensively into his background and truly considering how his texts connect to him personally, I am once again reminded of why I chose to study classics in the first place—the humanity imbued in even the most academically parsed texts. Similarly, reading and rereading Sima Qian’s beautifully crafted letter reminds me of why I study language—to listen to the author as directly as possible tell what they believed through the words they themselves chose.
How do you anticipate the fellowship will be able to support your research?
I am immensely excited to connect with my cohort as well as the other fellows in the center. Having a network of support will be invaluable to my writing and thinking processes. The office and free access to the center will also allow me to escape from the rest of campus for a space solely reserved for my project.
