Li Ren-Yuan's research focuses on books, knowledge, and society in imperial China. He received his PhD in East Asian Languages and History from Harvard University in 2014 and subsequently joined the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Currently, he is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology and also serves as the Director of IHP Archives, overseeing several databases, including Scripta Sinica and the Database of Chinese Historical Biographies, among others.
His first book, New Media and Intellectuals during the Late Qing: Study on Periodicals and Publication, was published in 2005. His subsequent research encompasses various topics, including Chinese local documents, ethnic groups and society in the southeastern mountainous regions of China, and the history of books and reading in China. He has experience conducting research and collecting materials in Chinese villages, as well as performing textual analysis. He is particularly interested in how textual knowledge was disseminated across different layers of society and its effects. He studies both handwritten and printed texts, from the village level to the intellectuals
At MPIWG, he was involved in the Working Group “Common Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th to 20th Centuries,” exploring leishu, category books or encyclopedia, their knowledge formation and their circulation in the context of commercial publication in late imperial China.
