Professor Mair has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 1979. He specializes in Buddhist popular literature as well as the vernacular tradition of Chinese fiction and the performing arts. Throughout the 1990's, Professor Mair organized an interdisciplinary research project on the Bronze Age and Iron Age mummies of Eastern Central Asia. Among other results of his efforts during this period were three documentaries for television (Scientific American, NOVA and Discovery Channel), a major international conference, numerous articles, and a book, "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West" (Thames and Hudson, 2000). |