Benjamin Porteous is a philologist and intellectual historian of South, Central, and East Asia in the first millenium of the Common Era. He studies the reorganization of intellectual life in China and Japan occasioned by sustained contact with South and Central Asian Buddhist languages, and methods of structuring complex philosophical arguments and parsing texts. He is particularly interested in practices of commentary in medieval South Asia and China, and the fusion of indigenous Chinese exegetical techniques with South and Central Asian ones. Ben has reading knowledge of Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, and is keenly interested in commentarial and philological practices across traditions. He works extensively with manuscripts, examining commentary and scholastic culture in manuscripts from Dunhuang, Turfan, and Nara and Heian Japan.
He holds a BA and MA from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, where he was an instructor in modern Chinese before coming to Yale.