David A. Graff is an associate professor in the Department of History and director of the East Asian Studies program at Kansas State University. He is also a member of the Security Studies faculty. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 1995 and came to Kansas State University in 1998 after holding temporary teaching positions at Southern Methodist University (1994-5) and Bowdoin College (1995-7) and spending a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard University (1997-8). His research focuses on Chinese military history, especially that of the Tang dynasty (618-907). He is currently working on a translation of what remains of Li Jing’s Art of War, an early Tang military text, and is also writing a book comparing Chinese and Byzantine military practice in the seventh century. He has taught all periods of Chinese and Japanese history for undergraduates, as well as world history at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. His graduate teaching has focused on East Asian military history and security issues.

Select Publications

"Narrative Maneuvers: The Representation of Battle in Tang Historical Writing," in Military Culture in Imperial China, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 143-164.

"Fang Guan's Chariots: Scholarship, War, and Character Assassination in the Middle Tang," Asia Major (3rd Series), 12.1 (2009): 105-130.

"Provincial Autonomy and Frontier Defense in Late Tang: The Case of the Lulong Army," in Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period, edited by Don J. Wyatt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 43-58

Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

Editor, with Robin Higham, of A Military History of China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).

"Meritorious Cannibal: Chang Hsün’s Defense of Sui-yang and the Exaltation of Loyalty in an Age of Rebellion," Asia Major (3rd Series), 8.1 (1995), 1-15.

"The Sword and the Brush: Career Patterns and Military Specialisation in the Tang Dynasty," War and Society 18.2 (October 2000), 9-21.

Courses Taught

HIST 111, World History to 1450
HIST 112, World History Since 1450
HIST 330, History of East Asian Civilizations
HIST 331, Introduction to Japan
HIST 504, Intellectual History of Early China
HIST 507, China Since 1644
HIST 508, Introduction to Modern China and Japan
HIST 509, Japan Since 1550
HIST 598, Topics: The Japanese Samurai
HIST 850, History and Security: East Asia
HIST 981, Topics: World History