Mengxi Zhao

Mengxi Zhao is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies (GPTS) at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) at Heidelberg University. She received her BA in Philosophy from Peking University and her MA in Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University. From 2019­ to 2020, she was a research associate at Kyoto University. Her ongoing dissertation project investigates the production, circulation, and reception of famine plant manuals—a genre that discusses edible plants for consumption in times of scarcity—both as texts and artifacts in early modern East Asia. At the MPIWG, she will focus on the transregional and transcultural circulation of famine plant knowledge and study how the knowledge embodied in texts and images was recontextualized in new sociocultural and linguistic realities. She is a member of the working group “Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700).”