Ori Sela

Ori Sela is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. He specializes in the history of Early-Modern and Modern China, and is interested particularly in the reciprocal relationship between intellectual history and socio-political history at various crossroads in China's past. The transition from China's imperial era into the nation-state building of the twentieth century, along with the crucial roles history has played and continues to play in current affairs, is another facet of his research and teaching.

Sela received his Master’s degree (magna cum laude) from the program for religious studies at Tel Aviv University, and his PhD from Princeton University. Sela’s dissertation, titled “Qian Daxin (1728–1804): Knowledge, Identity, and Reception History in China, 1750–1930,” dealt with the ways in which knowledge was produced from the middle of the Qing period until the Republican era, and investigated the links between concepts of identity and knowledge during this period. Among other things, Sela examines the relationships between scientific knowledge, historiography, categorization of knowledge, and intercultural interactions (with Japan and India as well as with the West).

While at the MPIWG, he worked on finalizing his book, China's Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.