Robert Eno « Faculty
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, EALC
Adjunct Associate Professor, Philosophy, History
eno 
indiana.edu
Goodbody Hall 328
(812) 855-5373
Education
- PhD, University of Michigan, 1984
Research Interests
- Early Chinese history
- Paleography of pre-Qin China
- Chinese philosophy
Courses Recently Taught
- EALC E100, East Asia: An Introduction
- EALC E232, China: The Enduring Heritage
- EALC E251 / HIST H237, Traditional East Asian Civilizations
- EALC C306, Introduction to Literary Chinese
- EALC E374 / PHIL P374, Early Chinese Philosophy
- HIST G380, Early China
- EALC C511, Basic Reference Works in Chinese Studies
- EALC C571, Readings in Chinese Philosophical Texts
Publication Highlights
- The Confucian Creation of Heaven (1990)
- "Was There a High God Ti in Shang Religion?" (1990)
- "Cook Ding's Dao and the Limits of Philosophy" (1996)
- "Selling Sagehood: The Philosophical Marketplace in Ancient China" (1997)
- "Casuistry and Character in the Mencius" (2002)
- "The Background of the Kong Family of Lu and the Origins of Ruism" (2003)
- "Shang State Religion and the Pantheon of the Oracle Texts" (2008)
I entered the field of Chinese studies almost accidentally mid-way through college. It was only after a few years of study that I discovered, to my surprise, that I had unintentionally fallen in love with the language and with Chinese culture, and I decided to postpone my original plan to leave academics. My early focus was on Chinese communist ideology and literature, but I kept moving backwards to learn more about where modern China came from, and wound up doing my doctoral work on ancient Chinese thought. Never having been talented in foreign languages, the shock of finding that I was able to read and to enjoy reading texts and inscriptions from thousands of years ago seems to have made me an early China addict, and though I try to keep up with the shape of medieval and modern China studies -- I enjoy teaching undergraduate surveys on China and on East Asia as a whole -- I've never returned to a research focus on those eras. Most of my published articles have been in the areas of early philosophy and religion -- I teach a course on early thought in the Philosophy department. Over the past ten years, my interest in approaching early China through the varied perspectives of social, political, and intellectual history has grown, and I now teach about early China in the History department as well. Recent research I've been doing on the origins of Confucianism as a social movement has also been directed as much towards questions of intellectual history as philosophy, exploring different ways to coax texts into revealing the distant world from which they arose. In a similar spirit, I now devote a substantial portion of my research to issues connected to paleography and philology, the study of ancient inscriptions and contexts for their interpretation.
