Christopher Beckwith :: Faculty
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Professor, Central Eurasian Studies Education
Ph.D. in Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, 1977 |
Research Interests
The history of pre-modern Central Eurasia, historical linguistics (primarily Indo-European, Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Japanese-Koguryoic, Turkic), theoretical phonology, typological linguistics, and computational linguistics.
Courses Recently Taught
- U190 Introduction to Inner Asia
- U582 Old Tibetan
- U595 Introduction to Central Eurasian History
- U673 Central Eurasian Languages
Publication Highlights
Phoronyms: Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007.
Koguryo, the Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives: An Introduction to the Historical-Comparative Study of the Japanese-Koguryoic Languages, with a Preliminary Description of Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese. Second Edition. Leiden: Brill, 2007 (first edition, 2004).
Koguryŏ: Ilbon-ŭl taeryuk-kwa yŏngyŏlsik’yŏ junŭn ŏn’ŏ. Korean translation of the preceding book. Seoul: Koguryŏ yŏn’gu jaedan, 2006.
Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987; paperback edition, with a new afterword, 1993.
Selected Articles
On the Proto-Indo-European Obstruent System. Historische Sprachforschung 2007, 120: 1-19.
Methodological Observations on Some Recent Studies of the Early Ethnolinguistic History of Korea and Vicinity. Altai Hakpo 2006, 16: 199-234.
Introduction: Toward a Tibeto-Burman Theory. In: C.I. Beckwith, ed., Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II. Leiden: Brill, 2006, 1-38.
The Sonority Sequencing Principle and Old Tibetan Syllable Margins. In: C.I. Beckwith, ed., Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II. Leiden: Brill, 2006, 45-55.
Old Tibetan and the Dialects and Periodization of Old Chinese. In: C.I. Beckwith, ed., Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II. Leiden: Brill, 2006, 179-200.
The Ethnolinguistic History of the Early Korean Peninsula Region: Japanese-Koguryoic and Other Languages in the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla Kingdoms. Journal of Inner and East Asian Studies, 2005, Vol. 2-2: 34-64.
On the Chinese Names for Tibet, Tabghatch, and the Turks. Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, 2005, 14: 5-20.
The Sino-Tibetan Problem. In: C.I. Beckwith, ed. Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 113-157.
The Idea of a Classifier System: Theoretical Problems in the Analysis of Japanese Noun Specification. Web Journal of Formal, Computational and Cognitive Linguistics, 1999. (Valery Solovyev, ed., Web Journal of Formal, Computational and Cognitive Linguistics, 1997-1999, CD edition, Kazan, 2000.)
Noun Specification and Classification in Uzbek. Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 40.1, 1998, 124-140.
The Morphological Argument for the Existence of Sino-Tibetan. Pan-Asiatic Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, January 8-10, 1996, Vol. III. Bangkok, 1996, 812-826.
The Impact of the Horse and Silk Trade on the Economies of T’ang China and the Uighur Empire: On the Importance of International Commerce in the Early Middle Ages. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 34, 1991, 183-198.
The Medieval Scholastic Method in Tibet and the West. In: L. Epstein and R. Sherburne, ed., Reflections on Tibetan Culture: Essays in Memory of Turrell V. Wylie. Lewiston, N.Y., 1990, 307-313.
The Location and Population of Tibet According to Early Islamic Sources. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 43, 1989, 163-170.
The Tibetans in the Ordos and North China: Considerations on the Role of the Tibetan Empire in World History. In: C.I. Beckwith, ed., Silver on Lapis. Bloomington, 1987, 3-11.
Aspects of the Early History of the Central Asian Guard Corps in Islam. Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, Vol. 4, l984, 29-43.
The Plan of the City of Peace: Central Asian Iranian Factors in Early ‘Abbâsid Design. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 38, l984, 128-147.
Forthcoming Articles
The Frankish Name of the King of the Turks. Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, Vol. 15: 5-11, in press.
A Note on the Name and Identity of the Junghars. Mongolian Studies, Vol. 29: 40-44, in press.
On Zhangzhung and Bon. In: Henk Blezer, ed., Emerging Bon. Halle: IITBS GmbH, 21 pp., forthcoming.
Current research projects
- A history of Central Eurasia from Indo-European times to the present
- the ethnolinguistic origins of the Turks
- ancient and medieval Central Asian philosophical texts
- Old Chinese transcriptions of Central Eurasian names
- reconstruction of Early Old Chinese
- mathematical representation of natural language
Selected Awards and Honors
- Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2004), 2005-2006.
- Japan Foundation Fellowship (2001), 2001-2002.
- MacArthur Fellowship, The MacArthur Foundation (1986), 1986-1991.
