Kinney, Anne Behnke

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Kinney, Anne Behnke

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Asian and Middle-Eastern Language and Cultures, University of Virginia, B 27 Cabell Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22901. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, associate professor of Chinese and former director of East Asia Center.

WRITINGS:

(And translator) The Art of the Han Essay: Wang Fu's Ch'ien-fu lun, Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ), 1990.

(Editor) Chinese Views of Childhood, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, HI), 1995.

Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2004.

(With Grant Hardy) The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Chinese Religion: Anthology Sources, Oxford University Press, 1995; Enfances, edited by Flora Blanchon, Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998; Women's Roles in Ancient Civilizations, edited by Bella Vivante, Greenwood Press, 1999; and Essays in Chinese Literature, University of Michigan Press. Contributor to scholarly journals, including T'oung Pao, Archaeology, Journal of Chinese Religions, and Early China.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Qianfu lun: A Complete Annotated Translation, for Yale University Press; Traditions of Exemplary Women: Liu Xiang's Lienü zhuan.

SIDELIGHTS: Anne Behnke Kinney is a professor of Chinese who has published several works about ancient imperial China. In The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China, which she wrote with Grant Hardy, Kinney provides an "excellent introduction" to the Han period that lasted from about 200 BCE to 200 CE, noted Patricia D. Lothrop in School Library Journal. Lothrop complimented the authors for producing a history book that is accessible to general audiences unfamiliar with Asian history and especially praised the chapter discussing "the cultural and political consequences of the Han Empire in East Asia." Diane C. Donovan, writing in MBR Bookwatch, similarly praised the text as "essential reading" for college students studying the Han dynasty.

Kinney has also explored sociological aspects of ancient Chinese society, as in her book Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China. Here she states that the old practice of valuing children based on whether they were born to prestigious families or not was altered with the rise of the Han empire. Because the growing empire needed intelligent and qualified people to help run its government, education and skills began to be more valued in a child than his or her lineage, and this had profound consequences on how Chinese society viewed its progeny. Although History: Review of New Books contributor Sandra A. Wawrytko noted the absence of "a chronological listing" of important figures in the book, the reviewer praised Kinney's work as an "exemplary piece of scholarship."