China Studies Centre, the University of Sydney
China Studies Centre, the University of Sydney
Monday, 15 April 2019 from 12:40 pm to 2:00 pm (AEST)
Room 708, Level 7, Jane Foss Russell Building | The University of Sydney | Camperdown/Darlington, NSW 2006 | Australia
Event registration page: http://bit.ly/DrorWeil
Masked by the traditional historiographical attention to the role that European missionaries played in introducing “Western ideas” to late Imperial China, the contribution of Sino-Islamic exchanges has only recently begun to draw scholarly attention. This talk focuses on a network of Chinese savants who sought new knowledge of the natural world through meticulous study of Arabic and Persian texts. Between the mid-16th and early-18th centuries, these savants undertook extensive travels in search of newly imported or long-forgotten Arabic and Persian manuscripts forgotten in libraries, or newly brought by visitors, and developed didactic methodologies to interpret these texts. Some published their scholarly insights in Chinese, thereby calibrating the accumulated knowledge of Greek, Arab and Persian traditions with contemporary Chinese theories and experiences.
The talk explores the methods by which Chinese sought to bridge linguistic, cultural and theoretical gaps in such Arabo-Persian texts, and the ways by which such foreign concepts and theories were interpreted, naturalised and presented to Chinese readers. By doing so, it presents a facet of the polyglot and multicultural nature of late Imperial China.
Speaker:Dror Weil is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD degree from Princeton University with the dissertation: “The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China’s Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge of the Natural World, 16th-18th Centuries.” His publications explore the scholarly exchanges between late imperial China and the Islamicate world in the fields of medicine, the astral sciences and philology.