Victor Mair is a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the curatorial consultant and catalog editor for the "Secrets of the Silk Road" exhibit. The symposium "Reconfiguring the Silk Road: New Research on East-West Exchange in Antiquity" was held in March 2011 at the Penn Museum in conjunction with the major exhibit from China, "Secrets of the Silk Road." The symposium was the first major event in over 15 years to focus on the history of the Silk Road and the origins of the mysterious Tarim Basin mummies. Since the last milestone conference was held on the topic at the Penn Museum in 1996, new archaeological discoveries and scholarly advances had been made, creating the need to critically reshape the very idea of the "Silk Road."