profile picture of Christian de Pee standing in front of a book shelf
Alumni

Christian de Pee

Visiting Scholar (Sep 2016-Mai 2017)

PhD, Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan

Christian de Pee is a cultural historian of Middle-Period China (800-1400 CE). In his research and publications, he tries to find historiographical forms and language that can accommodate the particularities of genre and literary expression in Middle-Period sources. In his first book, The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), he endeavored to recover the practice of Middle-Period weddings by seeking its living traces: in writing as a trace of ritual practice, in text as a ritual object, and in the material remains of joint burials of husbands and wives as arrangements of bodies and objects in ritual time and space. At present, he is preparing to write an intellectual history of the city in eleventh-century China. The book, provisionally titled The City as Nature: An Intellectual History of the City in Middle-Period China, 800-1150, will argue that the urban streetscape became an acceptable topic for literary composition in the course of the eleventh century, when imperial officials sought to discern an immanent, universal pattern in the confusing movement of goods, people, and money in the cities they administered. The research for this book manuscript was begun with a faculty fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan in 2010-2011 and continued with support from the American Council of Learned Societies in the form of a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars with affiliation at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Projekte

No current projects were found for this scholar.

The City as Nature: An Intellectual History of the City in Middle-Period China, 800–1150

MEHR

Selected Publications

de Pee, Christian (2022). Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800-1100. Global Chinese Histories, 250–1650 3. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048554331.

Read More

de Pee, Christian (2019). “Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China.” In Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self, ed. G. Bracken, 1:171–191. Amsterdam:…

Read More

de Pee, Christian (2018). “Circulation and Flow: Immanent Metaphors in the Financial Debates of Northern Song China (960–1127 CE).” History of Science 56 (2): 168–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317724706.

Read More

de Pee, Christian (2017). “Nature’s Capital: The City as Garden in ‘The Splendid Scenery of the Capital (Ducheng Jisheng, 1235).’” In Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127–1279, ed. J. Lam, S. Lin, C. de Pee, and…

Read More