Victor H. Mair

Dr. Victor Henry Mair, Scholar of East Asian Studies, longtime Swarthmore resident, and University of Pennsylvania professor, passed into the next world at Riddle hospital on June 28th 2026 at 9:38 PM. There was no official diagnosis and we surmise that he passed due to advanced age (83) and rapid decline due to medical device related infection. He was surrounded by loving family and friends on his last day and is survived by his son Thomas, his grandchildren Samira and LeoDaniel, his siblings Joseph, David, Thomas, Denis and Heidi, as well as his nephews Douglas, Derek, Dave Jr, Rhett and Matthew, and nieces Katrina, Rebecca and Colleen. Victor's influence among his students and colleagues and within academia was deep and far ranging. He authored a large amount of books as well as translations of seminal ancient Chinese texts such as Sun Tzu Art of War, Laozi Daodejing and Chuangzi Wandering on the Way, as well as serving as editor to countless publications and online forums, including Sino-Platonic Papers, and Language Log (online). It should be noted that Professor Mair, alongside his wife (d 2010) and sometimes recruiting their son, was deeply committed to the advancement of the adoption of the Pinyin system of Chinese language text communications. He was associate editor of the "ABC - Chinese English Dictionary." In youth, Victor was a French Horn player in the band at his hometown Ohio high School as well as captain of the basketball team and varsity football player. He attended undergraduate studies at Dartmouth and completed his Graduate PhD studies from Harvard. In between, he served as a United State Peace Corps volunteer in the country of Nepal. He was a lifelong world traveller, attending publishing conferences and association meetings, as well as leading tour groups. In his late life, he endeavoured to run across the country, beginning at the Atlantic ocean in Atlantic City, and through his hometown of East Canton, Ohio, following the historic original East West highway of our great nation - the Lincoln Highway (later known as Route 30, and now mostly Route 80) and eventually ending at the Pacific Ocean at Astoria Oregon. Victor will be sorely missed, and no longer seen running the Crum Creek forests, sometimes with a bowl of oatmeal in hand, always eager to stop and converse with his neighbors or admire a flower or tree. May Victor wander forever in all the playful and loving energies of the universe where he always dwelled while here among us.

I first heard of Victor Mair in the early 2000s, when a colleague, Jeannine Davis-Kimball, suggested that I watch a documentary she was in. The documentary was a PBS production, NOVA: Mysterious Mummies of China (1998). Jeannine had gone to the Taklamakan Desert with Victor, to examine ancient mummies which had surprisingly European characteristics, including blond and red hair.

I was fascinated by the leader of the expedition – who turned out to be Victor– and who, as I found out, was the first person to write about these mummies, along with a peer of mine from graduate school, Jim Mallory, in The Tarim Mummies.

This was the beginning of a synchronicity. A week after I watched the documentary, I had an email from Victor –whom I had never heard from before, and whom I had learned of only the week before –asking where he could find my first book, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book. A Sinologist who was interested in ancient female figures! This began a long and fruitful correspondence, which lasted close to 25 years.

Victor suggested that we write a paper together, on ancient female ‘display’ figures, and I thought we could present it at the 2004 Indo-European Studies conference at UCLA, where Victor was invited to give a Keynote address. We presented our paper, “Apotropaia and Fecundity in Eurasian Myth and Iconography: Erotic Female Display Figures;” the paper was published in 2005, in the Conference Proceedings. Victor thought we had a lot more to write on the subject, so we kept working, and this collaboration culminated in the Cambria Press volume, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. (For that, we won the 2012 Association for the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) Sarasvati award for the best nonfiction book; one award was given every other year). We also published a further look at Sacred Display in Victor’s Sino-Platonic Papers (2013).

Victor was one of the most collegially generous– and brilliant! – people I have ever worked with. I already miss him very much.

My first course with VHM, we spent two weeks attempting to understand and translate two lines: “道可道,非常道”. The answer eludes me still, though that began a 25-year intellectual friendship, even though I never progressed beyond undergraduate studies, VHM always found time to engage with me across his many interests. I had the good fortune to see him in person one more time this past fall, making the trip to AAS conference in Vancouver. My computer monitor ad hoc stand is a stack of hardcover 'Mathews' Chinese English Dictionary' and 'ABC 汉语大词典' (汉语大词典出版社 edition), so I am continually reminded of the example of his ferocious work ethic.

I have an academic heart while not an academic. VHM gave me peeks into his academic world ranging from picking up literary bulletins from the Shanghai offices of 汉语大词典出版社 to a rare, privileged browse of his book stacks. I recall a spring Beijing hutong walk back from lunch to his favorite hotel, where he paused all discussion so that he could savor 享受 the aftertaste of the strawberries that were in a dish at the end of the meal.

VHM imparted both the wisdom of taking that moment to savor while retaining the ability to be as excited as a child and profoundly funny. I don't know what in Qingdao started the foreskin 包皮 digression, Thomas may recember, it went on and on, increasingly funny as it continued. The academic rigor and comedy in his frigophobia discussion (fear of cold as a Chinese academy designated psychological condition resulting in wearing all those layers to the point of serious health risk from the heat).

I regret that I let the pandemic and his passionate turn in politics diverging from mine be excuses to not engage or visit in recent years when I should have. The past couple years we were more in contact. I had no academic qualification to be at AAS 2026 in Vancouver. My purpose was to see VHM in his public academic splendor.

My first sighting of him was the Friday evening, rushing with an armful of books to a session that had moved to a different room in the cavernous convention center.

A Saturday morning panel he presided over with inimitable style and energy. The academic conference model of huge numbers of concurrent sessions to empty meeting rooms so that each scholar can have 'presented' their paper, was populated by low-energy moderators who didn't even follow the published program order, let alone command the room, or ensure time for audience questions.

In Memory of Professor Victor H. Mair, My Intellectual Father

When I first learned of Professor Victor H. Mair’s passing, I cried for the entire afternoon. I was due to depart for Australia that evening to present papers at two conferences, and as I was leaving, I noticed a butterfly fluttering around my room. I live on the sixteenth floor, and I could hardly imagine how this delicate visitor had found its way so high. In Chinese folk belief, a butterfly may be a departed loved one returning to visit those who remain, and in that moment, I felt, instinctively, that Professor Mair had come to bid me a quiet farewell.

It seemed somehow fitting he should see me off on that academic journey, since Professor Mair was the mentor who continually inspired me to venture into new areas of research. For years, whenever I finished an article, I would ask myself, “Would Professor Mair find this interesting?” His intellectual curiosity became a guiding presence in my work, encouraging me to ask unexpected questions and pursue connections across languages, texts, and cultures. He was my intellectual father, the one who guided me on my transformation from an interpreter into a scholar of translation history and Sinology; he showed me, by his example and encouragement, a scholarly life I had not known was possible.

In 2011, when he invited Professor Wang Binghua to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, he gave me the opportunity to serve as an interpreter. That experience carried my interpreting practice into the academic waters I was just then dipping my toes into. His generosity continued throughout my doctoral studies and beyond. He devoted extraordinary care and attention to every paper I wrote and, later, to my dissertation. His comments showed me where an argument needed correcting, where an idea deserved further exploration, and how I might move forward. Reading those comments, I came to see how seriously he regarded scholarship and how much he believed in me.

As I think of him now, I hear his hearty laughter and see him in the classroom tossing a ball of crumpled scrap paper into the bin with the ease of a seasoned basketball player. I remember how he insisted on the importance of topolects and how he would request that I pronounce words in Taiwanese. I remember the tears in his eyes as we raised our glasses after my dissertation defense. When I received the Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar fellowship for 2023–24, he cheered for me with such excitement that you would think he had won it himself. And when I returned to Penn to give a talk, he welcomed me with an embrace that conveyed more than words ever could. I am especially grateful that we met once more at the AAS conference in Vancouver in 2026, though I did not know then how little time remained.

Even now I keep returning to that butterfly, the one that found its way into my home the night I learned of his passing. How fitting, for the scholar who translated the Zhuangzi into English as Wandering on the Way. Zhuang Zhou once dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting happily about; when he awoke, he could not tell whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was a man. I like to imagine that Professor Mair, too, has become a butterfly: fluttering gracefully, wandering carefree among the immortals, still delighting in that singular creativity of his as he roams freely through the fields he loved.

Without Professor Mair, I would not be the scholar I am today. So I can think of no more fitting a way to end this short—all too short—tribute, than the way I used to close my emails to him, words I reserved for him and will not use again:

Yours most sincerely,
Sophie