On Thursday 29 October 2020, 12:30 pm GMT, the China Centre at Oxford hosts an online presentation “The Invisible City: A Global Microhistory of Europeans and their Social Networks in Eighteenth Century Beijing.” The guest speaker is Eugenio Menegon, an associate professor at Boston University and an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies.
Menegon will examine the lives of the missionaries who worked as scientists and artisans at the Qing imperial court, an ideal setting to explore the deep structures of Chinese-Western socio-cultural and economic relations in early modern times. In pursuing their interests and stubbornly resisting bureaucratic control and autocratic hegemony, the Catholic missionaries operated within a vast planetary network and a series informal social networks. Menegon argues that these individuals’ experiences behind the public façade of power help to humanize and nuance “the claims of grand political and economic narratives, from the ‘Great Divergence’ between China and the West, to Qing state building. Through this group, we can expand the analysis to a larger network of individuals and institutions (also using digital scholarship approaches), extending from the Qing court to the entire world.”
Registration is available online, and questions may be sent to: giulia.falato@orinst.ox.ac.uk
The University of Oxford China Centre is a new hub for various academic activities related to China at the University of Oxford, located on the premises of St Hugh’s College in the magnificent Dickson Poon Building. By bringing together superb academics and researchers from a broad range of disciplines, the China Centre will foster innovative collaborative initiatives and ensure that Oxford’s research on China produces even more substantial impact, both domestically and abroad.
Additional details are available at the China Centre’s website: http://www.chinacentre.ox.ac.uk/am_event/the-invisible-city-a-global-microhistory-of-europeans-and-their-social-networks-in-eighteenth-century-beijing/