Professor Kern specializes in the study of Chinese antiquity. The author and editor of numerous books and articles crossing the disciplines of literature, history, religion, and art, he studies the practices of textual composition, transmission, and hermeneutics in the Chinese manuscript culture of the first millennium BCE. He is further interested in the comparative study of antiquity and currently co-edits Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon, a project spanning more than twenty premodern philological traditions from around the globe. His current monograph projects include Performance, Memory, and Authorship in Ancient China: The Formation of the Textual Tradition and The Chinese “Classic of Poetry” in Ancient Manuscripts: Studies in Poetry, Poetics, and the Sociology of Text. Kern also serves as President of the American Oriental Society (2023–2024) and directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures” at Renmin University of China (Beijing).