Robert E. Hegel

Robert E. Hegel (born January 9, 1943; ) is an American sinologist specializing in the fiction of late imperial China. He taught at Washington University in St. Louis, from 1975 until his retirement in the spring of 2018 and was made Liselotte Dieckman Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Chinese in 2006.

In 2000, the Institut de France, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres awarded Hegel the Prix Stanislas Julien for Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China.

Early life and education Hegel was born on January 9, 1943, in Goodrich, Michigan. He was inspired by the Soviet launching of the Sputnik rocket in 1957 to study engineering. But once enrolled at Michigan State University, he recalled later, he "discovered fairly quickly that it didn't matter how hard I studied calculus, I just couldn't understand it." Instead, he began to study Chinese, which he found "different, and much more difficult than I had imagined, but it was also fascinating", he said. "Chinese culture was unfamiliar, yet understandable — human interests and needs being pretty much constant around the world, after all."

In 1965, he entered the graduate program at Columbia University using a National Defense Foreign Language fellowship which supported him through coursework and a period of study in Taiwan. At Columbia he studied with C. T. Hsia, who was turning his attention to the classic Chinese novels. In Taiwan, Hegel took a supplementary job for the China Airlines flight magazine, which he credits with getting him outside the library to learn about Chinese culture.

Selected publications

"The Sights and Sounds of Red Cliffs: On Reading Su Shi," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) (Volume 20 1998): 11-30.