Dr Dror Weil
I am a historian of the pre-modern Asia, with a particular interest in scientific and other textual exchanges between the Islamicate world and China; cultural, intellectual and social histories of Late Imperial China; histories of medicine and science in Asia; and, histories of the book and textuality.
I studied for my BA degree in East Asian Studies and Economics at Tel Aviv University, and for an MA degree in History at National Chengchi University (政治大學) in Taipei. I earned a PhD degree from Princeton University with a dissertation titled: "The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China's Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge of the Natural World, 16th-18th Centuries" in 2016. I was a recipient of the Thomas Arthur Arnold Fund for Excellence in Historical Research fellowship at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University in 2017 and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge between 2017-2019. Before taking up a university lectureship at Cambridge in 2021, I served as a University Lecturer at the Department of History, King's College London for two academic years between 2019-2021.
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Key publications:
Edited volumes
Dror Weil, Katja Krause and Maria Auxent (eds), Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (London: Routledge, forthcoming June 2022).
Selected articles and book chapters
"Islamicated China - China's Participation in the Islamicate Book Culture during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 4, No. 1-2 (Jan. 2016), 36-60.
"The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China's Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy," in Patrick Manning and Abigail Owen (eds.) Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000-1800 CE (Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press, 2018), 345-370
"Chinese-Muslims as Agents of Astral Knowledge in Late Imperial China," in Bill Mak and Eric Huntington (eds.), Overlapping cosmologies in Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2022)
"Unveiling Nature: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Early Modern China," in "Translating Medicine," Elaine Leong, Sietske Fransen and Tara Alberts (eds.), special issue, Osiris 38 (forthcoming, 2022)
“Beyond Prose - Tabulating Medical Experience in Pre-Modern Asia,” in Dror Weil, Katja Krause and Maria Auxent (eds.), Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (London: Routledge, forthcoming June 2022).
co-authored with Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Chapter 29 - Galen in Premodern Tibet and China: Impressions and Footprints,” in Peter Singer and Ralph Rosen (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Galen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022).
"Collation and Articulation of Arabo-Persian Texts in Early Modern China," in Sonja Brentjes (ed.) Routledge Handbook on Science in the Islamicate World (New York: Routledge) (forthcoming June 2022).
"Theology, Ethics and Textual Sensitivity: The Multiple Notions of Xin 信 in Chinese-Islamic Texts," in Christian Meyer and Philip Clart (eds.) From Trustworthiness to Secular Beliefs – Changing Concepts of xin 信 from Traditional to Modern Chinese (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)
“Libraries of Arabic and Persian texts in late imperial China," in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 90-92.
"Literacy, in Arabic and Persian, in late imperial China,” in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 92-95.
“Kaifeng youtai houyi zai shisi shiji zhi shiqi shiji zhong de wenhua renting” 開封猶太後裔在 十四世紀至十七世紀中的文化認同 (“The Cultural Identity of the Descendants of Kaifeng Jews between the Fourteenth and the mid-Seventeenth centuries”) in Zhong Caijun and Zhou Daxing (eds.), Youtai yu Zhongguo chuantong de duihua 猶太與中國傳統的對話 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Literature and Philosophy, 2011), 263-309. (in Chinese)