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Alumni

Dror Weil

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (Nov 2018-Aug 2019)

PhD
Previously in Dept. II (Sept. 2017–Nov. 2018)

Dror Weil received his PhD from Princeton University's Department of East Asian Studies in 2016. His dissertation charts late imperial China's intellectual engagement with Arabic and Persian scholarly discourses on the natural world roughly between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Between September 2017 and November 2018, Dror was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Department II at the Institute, and a member of the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge. Before coming to the Institute, Dror was a Thomas Arnold Postdoctoral Fellow at Tel Aviv University.

His current research project deals with the circulation of Arabic and Persian texts in late imperial China and their translations into Chinese. In particular, he is interested in examining the scope, quality, and processes of translation and domestication of knowledge in the fields of medicine, astronomy, philology, and natural philosophy.

Dror has published on the movements of Arabic and Persian texts into China, and China’s domestication of Arabo-Persian knowledge during the late imperial period. His fields of expertise include the history of late imperial China, history of East Asia, history of Islam and the Islamicate world, the history of the book in Asia, translation theory, and sociology of knowledge.

He has taught courses on Asian history and languages at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, Princeton University, and Tel Aviv University.

Projects

No current projects were found for this scholar.

Experience in Translation: Making Sense of Nature in the Premodern World

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Medical Knowledge and the Circulation of Islamic Texts in China, Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries

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Translating Experience: The Transmission of Arabo-Persian Theories on Body and Soul to China, 14th–18th Centuries

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Selected Publications

Weil, Dror (2022). “Unveiling Nature: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Early Modern China.” Osiris 37: 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1086/719220.

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Weil, Dror (2020). “Libraries of Arabic and Persian Texts in Late Imperial China.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas, and E. Rowson, 3rd ed. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_35858.

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Weil, Dror (2020). “Literacy, in Arabic and Persian, in Late Imperial China.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas, and E. Rowson, 3rd ed. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_35877.

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Weil, Dror (2018). “The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China’s Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy.” In Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000–1800 CE, ed. P. Manning and A. Owen, 262–274. Pittsburgh, PA:…

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Past Events

Seminar

Science in a "Minor Language"

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Lecture

Machine Translation Before and After the Iron Curtain

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Seminar

Chasing Science on the Move: Translation, Domestication, Transformation

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Lecture

Of Lexical Shells and Textual Monstrosities: Tales of Translation in Late Imperial China

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Seminar

Tensions between Variability of Ancient Texts and Normativity of Databases: Case Studies

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Lecture

From Clay to Modern Editions: the Metamorphoses of Numbers

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News & Press

Summer 2018 Lecture Series in the “History of Knowledge” announced

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