Training

I currently supervise or co-supervise several loose categories of what SSHRC refers to as “highly qualified personnel” (HQP)—i.e., graduate students and postdocs—with some overlap between the categories:

1) Those interested in exploring Warring States Chinese thought (often from an embodied cognition or empirically-informed standpoint).

This is one of my areas of core expertise, and students working in this area will generally apply to the Asian Studies or Philosophy Departments (where I am an Associate Member), identifying me as their primary or co-advisor.

Please click here for more information on studying Warring States Chinese thought at UBC.

[IMPORTANT NOTE: I am planning to be on leave for the Spring Term in both 2012 and 2013, and am therefore unlikely to be accepting new students into Asian Studies this year.]

2) Those interested in the cognitive science of religion.

This is also one of my areas of core expertise. Unfortunately, UBC currently lacks a freestanding Religious Studies department (which was eliminated decades ago and merged into Classical and Near Eastern Studies, forming the current CNERS Department), which means that students interested in the cognitive science of religion but without sinological or classical Near Eastern expertise or interest would have to apply through the Department of Psychology, where I am an Associate Member and where there are faculty members (Ara Norenzayan, Joseph Henrich) and graduate students for whom the cognitive science of religion is a core interest. With my colleagues at HECC, I am currently working on creating an institutional framework that would allow us to fund both graduate student and postdocs specializing in the cognitive science and evolution of religion, and I also have a related postdoc position built into my current individual SSHRC application. Please check back for updates.

3) Those interested in exploring subjects unrelated to early China, but employing methods in which I have some expertise, such as cognitive linguistics, embodied cognition, or corpus surveys.

These are primarily Ph.D. students in unrelated discipline departments (English, Environmental Studies, Education) who wish to pursue a “vertically integrated” approach to their topics of research, and for whom I serve as an outside committee member and methodological advisor. At HECC we are currently developing a graduate certificate program that would allow graduate students from any discipline department to receive formal training in cognitive scientific and other approaches to humanistic topics, to have this training officially recognize in their degree designation, and to also become part of a community of like-minded scholars that we have gathered in Vancouver. Check the HECC website for updates on this initiative.