Dr Dror Weil

University Assistant Professor in History of Early Modern Asia (East Asia and the Islamicate world)

Fellow of King's College

I am a historian of 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 (國立政治大學) 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 held a permanent lectureship in History of Asia pre-1750 at the Department of History, King's College London. In 2022, I was invited to serve as a Visiting Professor at EHESS (Paris and Marseille).

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6098-0950

Research Supervision

I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in the history of the East Asia and the Islamicate World - from the late medieval to the 19th century, and in particular, those who wish to study cross-cultural movements of knowledge, texts, objects and people. I also welcome applications from students who wish to research the histories of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in China, the Mongol empire, Ilkhanid and Safavid Iran, and Yuan-Ming-Qing histories.

Teaching

For undergraduates, I am one of the conveners of the first-year Outline paper 'O5: Europe in the World, 1450-1780' and the first-year Sources option 'Reading Early Modern Asian Empires'. For Part II, I offer the Special Subject paper 'Beyond the Silk Road - Culture, Thought and Society in early modern Asia, 1000-1900', and I contribute relevant lectures to the papers 'Early Science and Medicine' (with HPS) and 'Paper 14: Material culture in the early modern world'.

At the postgraduate level, I serve as the Director of the MPhil in World History, and the convenor of the Core paper 'Debates in World History'. I will offer the optional paper 'The Global Early Modern Period' in LT.

I serve as one of the convenors of the World History research seminar series, Trans-regional East Asian History and Material Histories research groups.

Contact

Tags & Themes

Address

King's College

King's Parade, Cambridge, CB2 1ST

dw612@cam.ac.uk

Links

Profile on Academia.edu

Key publications:

Edited volumes

Dror Weil, Katja Krause and Maria Auxent (eds), Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (London: Routledge, June 2022). Open access

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.

co-authored with Sabine Schmidtke, "The Last Generation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums: The Case of Ern(e)st Mainz (1905–1984) and Marie Mirjam Mainz née Leibowitz (1904–1983)" (under peer review).

“Time and Temporalities in Early Modern Chinese Islam,” Journal for the History of Knowledge 4 (2023), 53–72.

"Straddling Boundaries: The Accommodation of Mirṣād al-‘Ibad in Early Modern China," International Journal of Asian Studies (2024), 1-13.

"Unveiling Nature: Liu Zhi’s Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Early Modern China," Osiris 37/1 (2022), 47-66

"Collation and Articulation of Arabo-Persian Scientific Texts in Early Modern China," in Routledge Handbook on Science in the Islamicate World, ed. Sonja Brentjes (New York: Routledge, 2023), 696-704.

"Chinese-Muslims as Agents of Astral Knowledge in Late Imperial China," in Overlapping cosmologies in Asia, ed. Bill Mak and Eric Huntington (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 116-138.

“Translating Medical Experience in Tables: The Case of Eleventh-Century Arabic Taqwīm Works,” in Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation eds. Dror Weil et als. (New york: Routledge, 2022), 230-49.

"The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China's Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy," in Knowledge in Translation: Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000-1800 CE, ed. Patrick Manning and Abigail Owen (Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press, 2018), 345-370

co-authored with Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Galen in Premodern Tibet and China: Impressions and Footprints,” in The Oxford Handbook of Galen, eds. Peter N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 658-74.

"Theology, Ethics and Textual Sensitivity: The Multiple Notions of Xin 信 in Chinese-Islamic Texts," in From Trustworthiness to Secular Beliefs – Changing Concepts of xin 信 from Traditional to Modern Chinese, ed. Christian Meyer and Philip Clart (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 287-306.

“Libraries of Arabic and Persian texts in late imperial China," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 90-92.

"Literacy, in Arabic and Persian, in late imperial China,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (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 Youtai yu Zhongguo chuantong de duihua 猶太與中國傳統的對話, ed. Zhong Caijun and Zhou Daxing (Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Literature and Philosophy, 2011), 263-309. (in Chinese)