Victor Henry Mair (/mɛər/; born March 25, 1943) is an American sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. Among other accomplishments, Mair has edited the standard Columbia History of Chinese Literature and the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Mair is the series editor of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (Cambria Press), and his book coauthored with Miriam Robbins Dexter (published by Cambria Press), Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia, won the Sarasvati Award for the Best Nonfiction Book in Women and Mythology.

Victor H. Mair was born on March 25, 1943, in East Canton, Ohio. After completing high school, Mair matriculated as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College, where, in addition to his studies, he was a member of the Dartmouth Big Green men's basketball team. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1965, then joined the Peace Corps and served in Nepal for two years. After leaving the Peace Corps in 1967, Mair returned to the United States and enrolled in the Buddhist Studies program at the University of Washington, where he began studying Buddhism, Sanskrit, and Classical Tibetan. In 1968, Mair won a Marshall Scholarship and moved to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London to further study Chinese and Sanskrit, receiving an honorary B.A. in 1972 and an M.Phil. in 1974. He then moved to Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1976 with a doctoral dissertation entitled "Popular Narratives From Tun-huang", a study and translation of folk literature discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts.

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