Xu, Chun 徐淳 is a historian of late imperial China. He received his PhD in 2018 from Heidelberg University. Focusing on agriculture and water control, Chun studies the interplay between technology and political processes in Song, Yuan, and Ming times. His current book project, “Dragons and Commissioners,” is a study of the Ming Empire on the ground in its remotest province of Yunnan in which he explores how the study of technology in a predominantly agrarian society could reformulate perspectives on Ming China as a premodern empire. He is also working on a project that examines the epistemological and technological underpinnings of the eleventh-century reform in Song China.
Chun Xu is leader of the Working Group “Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700).”
Current Projects
Completed Projects
Past Events
Talk
Putting Knowledge to Practice: "Reading" Agricultural Terraces in Medieval Palestine
MOREColloquium
Revulsion as Prevention: Emotional Science and the Mobilisation of Sensibility in Late 19th-century Russian Public Medicine
MOREColloquium
Religious Contexts of Discourses on Nature: The Comet of 1577 in Early-Modern Germany
MOREColloquium
Depicting Time: The Visualisation of the Planetary Deities and the Seven-Day Astrological Week in the Graeco-Roman World
MOREColloquium
Ritual Healing through Sealing (7th -12th-century China): Materiality and the Healer’s Body in the Earliest Examples of Medical “Palm Formulas” (zhangjue 掌訣)
MORETalk
The Checkered Game of Mandarin Life: Revisiting Official Careers in the Digital Age
MORESeminar
Soils, Stars, and Statecraft: Cosmological Conceptions of Agriculture in China and Europe, ca. 1600-1789
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