Luc Kwanten

Luc Kwanten (born 1943) is a Belgian sinologist, Tangutologist and literary agent.

Biography

Kwanten grew up in Brussels. He studied for a PhD at the University of South Carolina, and completed his dissertation on "Tibetan-Mongol Relations during the Yuan Dynasty, 1207–1368" in 1972.

He taught at Ramapo College in New Jersey between 1972 and 1974, and was an Associate Professor for Chinese and Inner Asian History at the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies of Indiana University from 1974 to 1978. He was subsequently appointed Associate Professor of Chinese and Central Asian History and Philology and Curator of the Far Eastern Library at the University of Chicago. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Kwanten published a number of articles on the extinct Tangut language, as well as a book-length study of the Chinese glosses in the 12th-century Chinese-Tangut glossary, Pearl in the Palm. He also raised the possibility that the Tangut language was not a Sino-Tibetan language as is generally thought, but may have belong in the Altaic language family.