Paul Vierthaler is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies in the Modern Languages and Literatures department at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg Virginia.
From 2016 until 2019, Paul was a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Digital Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Together with Hilde De Weerdt and Javier Cha, he founded the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities.
In 2015-2016, Paul was the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College. The year prior, he was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University (2014-2015).
Paul specializes in Ming and Qing dynasty literature and the technical digital humanities. His current research focuses on late Ming and early Qing literary representations of recent events, late Imperial print culture and history, genre analysis, and authorship studies. His research incorporates a combination of close reading and traditional critical analysis with natural language processing, corpus linguistics, machine learning and unstructured/structured data analysis. He programs in primarily in Python but dabbles in C (for CUDA), Java, and JavaScript (for visualizations). He also devotes time to developing software that aids others in digital analysis. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Cultural Analytics, Renaissance Quarterly, History Compass, in translation in Shuzirenwen 數字人文, and elsewhere.
He earned his PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2014. His dissertation, “Quasi-history and Public Knowledge: A Social History of late Ming and early Qing Unofficial Historical Narratives”, uses a combination of technical and traditional methods to analyze how recent historical events were represented in fictional, dramatic, and unofficial historical narratives in mid-sixteenth century to early eighteenth century China. It was completed under the direction of Tina Lu.
Paul completed his dissertation while on a Fulbright grant in Taiwan for the 2013-2014 academic year. While there, he was affiliated with the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica and worked with Lawrence Yim and Evelyn Liu. He also spent some time working with Guo Yingde at Beijing Normal University during the spring 2014 semester.
Paul earned a Master of Arts in East Asian Studies from Yale in 2008, and a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Political Science from the University of Kansas is 2005.
In addition to spending the 2013-2014 academic year in Taiwan, he has also lived in Beijing for two years, and Kunming, Yunnan from fall 2006 until summer 2007, when he returned to the United States to pursue a Masters degree. In Kunming, he studied Chinese short stories and classical Chinese at Yunnan Normal University. He received the bulk of his formal language training at the University of Kansas (2001-2005), at the Associated Colleges in China (2003-2004), and the Inter-University program (summer 2009).
Paul is a member of the Association for Asian Studies, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and Phi Beta Kappa. He also runs a semi-active Twitter account, where he tweets about China, the digital humanities, and literature and science in general.
A native of Dodge City, Kansas, Paul is also an avid rock-climber, amateur mechanic, Minecraft aficionado, cocktail enthusiast, and KU basketball fan. As of 2021 he is the proud father of twin girls.