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Alumni

Chun Xu

Research Scholar (2018–2024)

Dr.

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

Agriculture and the Making of Sciences
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Completed Projects

The Technological Underpinnings of Political Reform in Eleventh-Century China
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Agriculture and Water
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Soil & Agricultural Knowledge
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Farming Manuals
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Past Events

Colloquium

Disaster in the East Asian History of Science

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Colloquium

The Making of Calculable Territory in Song Dynasty China, 1000–1250

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Reading Group

"Household Encyclopedia" Primary Source Reading Group

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Talk

Putting Knowledge to Practice: "Reading" Agricultural Terraces in Medieval Palestine

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Colloquium

The Agrarian Structure of the Sultanate of Mysore (1761-1799)

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Talk

Moonrise, Moonset, and Planting Times

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Colloquium

Revulsion as Prevention: Emotional Science and the Mobilisation of Sensibility in Late 19th-century Russian Public Medicine

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Colloquium

Religious Contexts of Discourses on Nature: The Comet of 1577 in Early-Modern Germany

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Colloquium

Depicting Time: The Visualisation of the Planetary Deities and the Seven-Day Astrological Week in the Graeco-Roman World

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Colloquium

Ignorance and Its Resources: China and Beyond

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Colloquium

The "Ecological" Origins and Consequences of the Rodent Bait Station

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Colloquium

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)

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Seminar

Water’s Benefits: Scholarly Knowledge and Statecraft Science

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Colloquium

Reaping the Benefits of Water in the Early Ming: A Political Epistemology

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Talk

The Checkered Game of Mandarin Life: Revisiting Official Careers in the Digital Age

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Seminar

Soils, Stars, and Statecraft: Cosmological Conceptions of Agriculture in China and Europe, ca. 1600-1789

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News & Press

Academic publisher Brill releases new open-access series Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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