Martin Powers Professor U of M Affiliation(s) Center for Chinese Studies PhD University of Chicago

Martin Powers is Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, and former Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. In 1991 his Art and Political Expression in Early China received the Levenson Prize for the best book in pre-twentieth century Chinese Studies. His research focuses on the role of the arts in the history of human relations in China, with an emphasis on issues of personal agency and social justice. His Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China, was published by Harvard University Press East Asian Series in 2006 and has been awarded the Levenson Prize for 2008. He maintains a series in Du Shu, a Chinese journal of culture and current affairs.

Books:

Pattern and Person: Ornament and Social Thought in Classical China, Harvard University Press East Asian Series, 2006.

Art and Political Expression in Early China. Yale University Press, 1991.

Articles:

"Landscape Assessment," in Rachael Z. DeLue and James Elkins, Landscape Theory (The Art Seminar), (London, 2007), 259 – 277.

Chapter under Powers in Discovering Chinese Painting: Dialogues with American Art Historians, ed., Jason Kuo, (Dubuque, 2006), 143 - 155.

“When is a Landscape like a Body?” Landscape, Culture, and Power, ed., Yeh Xin Liu. Center for Chinese Studies, (Berkeley, 1998), 1-21.

"Love and Marriage in Song China: Tao Yuanming Comes Home," Ars Orientalis XXVIII (1998), 51 - 62.

"Garden Rocks, Fractals and Freedom: Tao Yuanming Comes Home," Oriental Art, v. XLIV (Winter, 1998), 28-38.
"Questioning Orthodoxy," Orientations 28, no. 10 (November, 1997), 73-4.

"Discourses of Representation in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century China," The Art of Interpreting: Papers in Art History from Pennsylvania State University IX, ed., S. C. Scott. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 1995.

“Art and History: Exploring the Counterchange Condition,” Art Bulletin, v. LXXVII (1996), pp. 382-87.

"Artistic Taste, the Economy and the Social Order in Former Han China," Art History, v. 9 (1986), pp. pp. 285-305.

"Pictorial Art and its Public in Early Imperial China," Art History, v. 7 (1984), pp. 135-163.