Benjamin Gallant is a scholar of early Chinese intellectual and legal history. He recently completed his doctorate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and previously received an MA from the Department of Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University. His dissertation, “The Center Cannot Hold: A Cultural History of the Emergence of the State,” examined the sociopolitical importance of gift-giving in ancient China, with a particular focus on how state formation was materially and discursively linked to gift-giving. His work draws on a wide array of received and recently discovered textual sources to situate early Chinese history in relation to larger comparative historical questions, and explores how the importance of the Maussian gift offers a new perspective for rethinking conceptions of Chinese officialdom rooted in the Weberian idea of an impersonal bureaucracy. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard.