From the organizers:

Mid-16th century China saw a surprising emergence of a network of local savants who shared an interest in the exploration of Arabic and Persian texts. To that end, they undertook extensive searches for Arabic and Persian manuscripts, forgotten in libraries or newly brought to China along a growing influx of foreign visitors, and meticulously studied their contents. This talk will tell the rather unique story of the hundreds of Arabic and Persian works that circulated in China between the 16th and 18th centuries. It will explore the scholarly practices by which Chinese savants read, interpreted, and remade Arabo-Persian works, while bridging the cultural, linguistic and epistemic differences. It will shed light on some of the inherent challenges of domesticating a foreign textual archive at the margins of a literary tradition, and the incentives to transform the traditional manuscript-based scholarship into print. Dror Weil is an Assistant Professor in History of Early Modern Asia (East Asia and the Islamicate World) at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study during the academic year 2024/2025. Dror graduated from Princeton University in 2016.

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