Michael Schimmelpfennig worked as coordinator of the Graduate school for the Study of Religion and Normativity while completing his PhD at the University of Heidelberg. He moved on to work as coordinator and lecturer of the Graduate School for Chinese and Japanese postgraduates' research on "Knowledge Transfer between Europe and China" at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before taking up a position as lecturer at the Chair of Chinese studies at Erlangen, offering courses in Literary Chinese and graduate seminars on various topics in Chinese literature, history, society, and research methodology. Before joining the ANU in 2013, he served as interim professor of Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt.
Research Interest
Michael Schimmelpfennig's research interests do hardly fit categories of being a specialist in a particular research area. In a more traditional sense he rather regards himself as a sinologist. He studied Chinese archeaology before he developed a deep interest in early traditional Chinese literature and poetry, specialising in the history of textual reception and commentarial interpretation. In more recent work he engages with the history of meaning of Chinese terms for conceptual ideas, in particular those concerning human relations in and beyond the family in China's past and present. Even more recently he began to explore the possibilities offered by Digital Humanities in Chinese Studies, focussing on the computational analysis of large corpora of traditional Chinese texts, in particular the ways to meaningfully employ algorithms in analysing multilayered texts, i. e. text with multiple commentaries.