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Kelsey Granger is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow affiliated with both LMU’s Institute of Sinology and the RCC. She is a sinologist and historian of dynastic China and the wider Silk Roads, receiving her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2022. She specializes in the material culture of early, medieval, and early modern China with a particular interest in the histories of animals.
During her time in Munich, she is researching the lives of postal horses as seen in the 20 000 documents unearthed from the Xuanquan 懸泉 postal station on the northwestern border of China’s Han empire (202 BCE–220 CE). Taking an animal studies approach, her project’s first focus was on the evident naming of individual horses within the site’s archive, resulting in a forthcoming article with Early China. In the second phase of the project, she aims to produce a further article exploring the complex emotional bonds forged between humans and horses. Doing so will recontextualize Xuanquan, and indeed other postal stations, as places of human-horse co-habitation, co-operation, collaboration, and contention.
RCC Research Project: Human-Horse Bonds on the Frontiers of China: Co-species Living at the Xuanquan Postal Station as Seen through Excavated Han-period Documents
Selected Publications:
- “Calm at the Carriage, Kills Bandits, Protects the Stables: Unique Horse Names in Excavated Han Administrative Documents from Xuanquan.” Early China (forthcoming).
- “From Tomb-keeper to Tomb-occupant: The Changing Conceptualisation of Dogs in Early China.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 33, no. 3 (2023): 685–701.
- “Three Curious Dogs in a Dunhuang Manuscript: Re-evaluating the Identification of ‘Yaks’ in Pelliot Chinois 2598.” Bulletin of SOAS 84, no. 2 (2021): 341–54.