MARAAS / Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies

2026 Distinguished Asianist

CONSTANCE A. COOK
Professor Emerita, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA USA

Areas of Specialty: Ancient Chinese history, religion, literature, and medicine, focus on unearthed manuscripts and inscriptions.


Professor Cook retired at the end of 2024 as chair of the Modern Languages and Literature Department and full professor, after 35 years at Lehigh University, where she taught classes in language, literature, and history. During her years at Lehigh, she directed the Asian Studies Program, founded and directed a Lehigh in Shanghai Internship Program, and Co-Directed a Luce Foundation funded China and Lehigh cooperative engineering project. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkley in 1990 and her BA and MA from the University of Washington in Seattle. As a student, she spent several years in Taiwan and Beijing. While at Lehigh, she was honored with NEH Distinguished Scholar funding, a year of research in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, research fellowships at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, and funding as a Senior Research Fulbright Scholar at Beijing Normal University. She has also been generously funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, National Endowment for the humanities, the National Academy of Sciences, as well as Lehigh University. This support gave her the time to research and publish. She has authored seven books and edited five. Titles of her books—some of which are the fruits pf cooperative projects with others—include: Medicine and Healing in Ancient East Asia: A View from Excavated Texts (Cambridge 2023), Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination and Its Transcultural Context (Brill, 2021), Birth in Ancient China: A Study of Metaphor and Cultural Identity in Pre-imperial China (State University of New York. 2017), Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching (Oxford, 2017), Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao (Harvard, 2017), Ancient China: A History (Routledge, 2017), and Death in Ancient China: The Tale of One Man’s Journey (Brill, 2006). Her edited books focus on pre-imperial Chinese history, religion, paleography, and Chu culture studies. Publishing in English and in Chinese, she has also contributed over 18 chapters, 24 refereed articles, and multiple non-refereed articles, encyclopedia entries, translations, reports, and book reviews. Subjects touch on divination, ritual, medical, and Chu culture topics in sources such as the Shang oracle bones, Zhou bronze inscriptions, Chu bamboo manuscripts, Qin and Han medical manuscripts, Zhou and Han divination manuscripts, and other archaeological materials. Since the 1980s, Professor Cook has given numerous talks every year at universities and conferences in China, the US, and in Europe. Since retirement, she has presented her most recent work at Columbia University, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Wuhan University, Yale University, and elsewhere.

MARASS lecture topic: “Illness and the Cosmic Body in Fourth Century BCE”

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