Wolfgang Behr - Biography#

Wolfgang Behr (*1965) read Sinology, Slavic Studies, Indo-European and Comparative Linguistics and Sociology in Frankfurt/M. (Germany), Shenyang (PRC), Changchun (PRC) and Moscow (then: USSR). He received his MA in 1991 with a thesis on Sanskrit-Chinese lexicography, his Ph.D. in 1997 with a dissertation on "Rhyming Bronze Inscriptions and the Origins of Chinese End-Rhyme Versificaton", his Habilitation in 2008 ("Phonological and Morphological Studies in Early Chinese History of Thought and Culture").

Between 1991-1997 he was Teaching & Research Assistant at J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/M., in 1998 Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, working on Sino-Tibetan ablaut morphology, before becoming tenured Reader in Classical Chinese at Ruhr-University Bochum (1998-2008). In 2005 he held a Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala.

Since September 2008 he is Professor & Traditional China Chair at the University of Zurich (UZH). In 2014 he held a fellowship at the MPI for the History of Science, Berlin, and was a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2017 he was Visiting Professor at the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology (HK). In 2009, he became Head of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. programme "Asia and Europe" which produced some 40 Ph.Ds and Habilitationen since.

From 2013-2015 he also served as Executive Director of the Research Priority Program "Asia and Europe" at UZH, since 2018 as Dean of Research.

He is member of seven journal boards, several international science panels, has widely served as reviewer for journals, book series, grants, tenure procedures and search committees, as president of several Swiss and European Science Associations. His work as one of the editors of the "Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics" (5 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2017) involved the cooperation with some 390 authors from all over the world over a production period of almost a decade.