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Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative. Roth is a specialist in Early Chinese Religious Thought, Taoism, the History of East Asian Religions, the Comparative Study of Mysticism and a pioneer in the developing field of Contemplative Studies. His publications include five books, The Textual History of the Huai-nan Tzu (Association for Asian Studies, 1992),  Original Tao: "Inward Training" and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Columbia University Press, 1999),  Daoist Identity: Cosmology. Lineage, and Ritual  (w/Livia Kohn) (University of Hawaii Press, 2002, A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: the Inner Chapters (Society for Asian and Comparative Philoosophy, 2003), and The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China, by Liu An, King of Huainan. (w/John S Major, Sarah Queen, and Andrew S. Meyer)(Columbia, 2009). He has also published more than three dozen articles on the early history and religious thought of the Taoist tradition and on the textual history and textual criticism of classical Chinese works, and on Contemplative Studies.


Roth's articles have been published in many leading academic journals, including the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Early China, Taoist Resources, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, China Review International, the Journal of Chinese Religions and the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and he was written chapters or articles in such works as The Religions of China in Practice, the revised Sources of Chinese Tradition and Encyclopedia of Religion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the festschrift for Angus Graham.


In addition, Roth has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation For International Scholarly Exchange. He also was awarded a Wriston Fellowship for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Roth has served his academic field in a variety of ways. First, he served on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions for a decade starting in 1993,  during which time he has also served on the editorial boards of four international journals of Taoism and Early Chinese Studies. In addition to this he was the founder and Co-Organizer of the New England Symposium of Chinese Thought (1988-93), the organizer of a total of four academic panels at the Association for Asian Studies and American Oriental Society, and the Co-Organizer of the Second American-Japanese Conference on Taoist Studies (1998).

In 2008 and 2009 Roth gave named lectures at Pacific Lutheran University, The GTU at UC Berkeley, and at the ASIANetwork Conference.
He has also given papers at numerous conferences of academic organizations including ones in China, Japan, Holland, and Canada, and he has presented more than two dozen invited lectures at such institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Stanford, Dartmouth, McGill, and Tôyô University in Japan. At Brown he has been Concentration Advisor in the Departments of Religious Studies (1987-93, 2000-2001), and East Asian Studies (1991-98), and has sat on numerous department and university committees, including the Tenure, Promotions, and Appointments Committee that he will chair in the 2004-05 academic year. Roth is continuing his research on early Taoism, comparative mysticism, and on the critical preparation and analysis of early Chinese texts through a number of ongoing projects including a study and translation of the essays on "inner cultivation" in the Kuan Tzu.

As a pioneer and innovator in the field of Contemplative Studies, Roth has developed courses that combine traditional third-person study with critical first-person approaches.

Download Harold Roth's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format