01
Divination and uncertainty
Reconstructing how signs, mantic practices, and systems of prognostication made uncertain futures intelligible in Chinese history.
Research objective
A comparative history of knowledge
To reconstruct Chinese forms of knowledge on their own historical terms and to explain how concepts were transformed as they moved between China and Europe.
Central aim
Comparison without reduction
The research brings the history of divination, classical interpretation, and conceptual transfer into a single programme. It asks how Chinese intellectual practices made uncertainty and textual authority intelligible, and how translation reshaped philosophical and political ideas in encounters with Europe. The aim is a historically precise comparison that preserves the specificity of each tradition.
02
Classical interpretation
Examining how Song-dynasty scholars organized textual meaning, authority, and intellectual continuity through the classical tradition.
03
Conceptual transfer
Tracing how philosophical and political concepts changed through translation and cultural transfer between China and Europe.
Fields of inquiry
Questions across history, language, and knowledge
- Divination and prognostication in China
- Classical studies in the Song dynasty
- Sino-Western cross-cultural transfer (language, philosophy, history of ideas), 16th–20th centuries
- Chinese assertions of identity (from late imperial China to the 20th century)
- History of political thought in China
Languages
Research across traditions
- Active
- German, English, French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish
- Reading
- Latin, Russian