Thomas Moran

Professor of Chinese Thomas (Tom) Moran has a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature from Cornell University and has been at Middlebury since 1994. He teaches courses in 20^th- and 21^st-century Chinese literature, film, and documentary film. Tom was the lead teacher in Beginning Chinese for many years and, more recently, performed the same role in Intermediate Chinese. He has taught First Year Seminars on the culture of mountains in the East and the West, the discourse of nature in Chinese civilization, and “Fate, Filial Piety and Passion in Chinese Civilization,” which he is offering in the fall 2024 semester.

In the 2024-2025 academic year, Tom is the Chair of the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese, his fifth term as Chair since 2001. Tom has also been Director of East Asian Studies (2009-2011), acting director of the Literature Program (2009-2010), and director of the C.V. Starr Middlebury School in China, Beijing (spring 2011). He has received grants from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Library of Taiwan, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program.

Tom is the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 (2007) and co-editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000 (2013). For these volumes Tom wrote the introductions and the essays on the writers Ding Ling, Zhang Tianyi, Gao Xingjian, and Liu Heng. In 2021, Tom and his co-editor published Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Poets Since 1949 in 2021, for which Tom co-wrote the introduction and wrote the essay on Taiwan poet Yu Guangzhong.

Tom has published book chapters and articles and translations of modern and contemporary Chinese plays, short stories, film scripts, and essays. His most recently published work includes his book chapter, “Resignation Open-Eyed: On the Chinese Novel Rickshaw Boy by Lao She,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature (John Wiley & Sons Ltd/Inc., 2020.

Tom’s translation of a 2010 novel by Beijing-based author Ning Ken will be published in late 2024 as Tibetan Sky by Sinoist Books. Tom is currently working on a translation of Ning Ken’s 2014 novel Three Trios.

Over the past twenty-five years, Tom has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to arrange for several Chinese artists to visit Middlebury to lecture, read their work and show their films, including novelist Ning Ken, nature writers Liu Kexiang and Zhang Dan, filmmakers Liu Jiayin, Zhang Mengqi and Wu Wenguang, and poets Aku Wuwu, Yu Jian, Xi Chuan and Bei Dao. At Tom’s invitation Taiwan poet and filmmaker Ye Mimi will come to Middlebury in October 2024 to read her work and do a session of her “Poetry Tarot” with Tom’s First Year Seminar students. 

Tom has been affiliated with Middlebury’s program in environmental studies since 2004. His article “Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain” (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol 14, No 2, Fall 2002), a study of a novel by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, was one of the first works of ecocriticism about modern Chinese literature. He has published translations of selections from the late Chinese essayist and deep ecologist Wei An’s “Things on Earth,” which have appeared in “Mānoa,” “Cerise Press,” and the “New England Review.”

Before beginning graduate school at Cornell in 1984, Tom majored in Journalism, English, and Education at Syracuse University, worked as a carpenter’s assistant, and taught sixth grade at the International School of Beijing and eighth grade at Holy Redeemer School in Washington, D.C. Tom is married to the painter Rebecca Purdum (http://rebeccapurdumpaintings.com/), whose work is in the collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Since 1999 Tom and Rebecca have lived in Ripton, Vermont. They have volunteered as “citizen scientists” for the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas, Vermont Forest Bird Monitoring Program and, currently, Mountain Birdwatch.