William H. Nienhauser, Jr.

William H. Nienhauser, Jr. (born 1943) is an American academic, who has been Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Chinese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1995.

Nienhauser was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He first studied Chinese at the Army Language School (1963–64), and went on to major in Chinese literature at Indiana University and Bonn University (1968–69), receiving his BA (Phi Beta Kappa), MA and Ph.D from Indiana (1966, 1968, and 1973). Although he began working on modern Chinese literature under Professor Liu Wuji 柳無忌 (1907-2002), the year he spent studying Tang literature under Professor Peter Olbricht at Bonn directed him towards working on Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773-819) and Tang fiction. In 1973 Nienhauser edited a volume of essays on Liu published in the Twayne World Author Series and took up a position as assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His publications include the two-volume Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature and six volumes of translations from the Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records). In 1979 Nienhauser was a founding editor of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), which he edited until 2009. He has taught or conducted research at several universities in Germany, at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, at Kyoto University, National Taiwan University, Peking University, and Nanyang Technical University (Singapore). In addition to grants from American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2003 he was awarded a Forschungspreis (Research Prize) for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation.[1]