Dr. Stephen OwenSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

Rudenstine described Stephen Owen as "a brilliant and varied scholar" who "has a genuinely outstanding sense of literary quality and the capacity to assist his students and readers grasp the most distinctive features of the literature he teaches and writes about." Remembrances is a lucid and compassionate interpretation of Chinese poetry that we are unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

Harvard is privileged to have him join its ranks of University Professors. Owen, according to Chinese history professor Peter Bol, is in a class by himself in terms of his career and accomplishments. He is without a doubt the most influential figure in the study of Chinese literature in the West. Owen, 51, was born in St.

Louis and raised in Arkansas and Maryland. As an adolescent, he began to visit the Baltimore public library and developed an interest in Chinese literature. I got captivated with poetry books, particularly Chinese poetry in translation, and have been so ever since.

I used to write poetry, but then I realized I was better at writing prose, especially literary criticism, he stated. Owen graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree and a doctorate. He taught at Yale from 1972 to 1982, when he became a professor at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

He was the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Chinese before becoming a University Professor. Owen has written several essays and books about Chinese literature and comparative literature.

Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: An Omen of the World (1985); Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (1986); and Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (1987). An Anthology of Chinese Literature (Norton & Co., 1996) is Owen's most recent work, a 1,200-page tome covering 2,500 years.

Owen nearly fully translated the hundreds of choices himself, as well as producing the annotations and critical introductions.