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Symposium Title: Networks of knowledge in Eurasia and North Africa between 1200 and
1700
Organizers: Nahyan Fancy (CHOSTIS), Michael Stanley-Baker (ISHEASTM), Matteo Martelli
(IAHS) and Baichun Zhang (IAHS).
Abstract:
In the thirteenth century, the Mongols emerged on the scene as a global empire and
established one of the largest contiguous land empires in history, leading to the movement
of peoples, goods, languages and knowledge across Eurasia. The seventeenth century
witnessed the growing influence and penetration of Western European empires in this
region, circulating and moving peoples, goods and knowledge in North Africa and Eurasia.
Modern scholarship, though, has often struggled to understand and grasp these
phenomena at a global scale, often due to training and venues of presentation and
publication that limit exposure to specific languages, regions and types of knowledge. This
symposium will bring together colleagues working on regions ranging from East and South
Asia to Western Europe and North Africa, on disciplines ranging from medicine and
mathematics to veterinary science and alchemy, and in languages ranging from Chinese
and Arabic, to Greek, Latin and Turkish. Some will be presenting work that examines more
local, disciplinary networks, while others will focus on more regional and even global
networks of exchange, transfer and appropriation of knowledge. Participants (and audience
members) will learn how diverse subfields approach similar topics using different
methodologies, research questions, sources, etc, in the hope that this will improve their
own scholarship and lead to future integrations and collaborations. For example, we can
compare diverse documentary forms found across these regions during this period, and
how the power-relations and technologies of documenting objects impacts the “knowing”
of them. How differently do these societies frame, epistemically, objects of their
investigation, whether physical or conceptual? Moreover, the symposium in its make-up
and approach intentionally by de-centres western Europe, in the hope that such de
centring will help illuminate some of the limitations of current discussions related to the
‘global turn’ in the history of science, and how to overcome them.
No. of 90-minute Panels requested: 5
Participants:
Qu Anjing (Northwest University, Xian)
Anna Akasoy (City University of New York)
Hamid Bohloul (Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Tehran & Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, Berlin)
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Emilia Calvo & Montserrat Diaz-Fajardo (University of Barcelona)
Maria Conforti (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College, New York)
Nahyan Fancy (University of Exeter)
Cheng Hsiao-wen (University of Pennsylvania)
Nadine Löhr (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich)
Matteo Martelli (University of Bologna)
Maragret Ng (College of Wooster, Ohio)
Michael Stanley-Baker (Hamilton College)
Chen Wei (Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Liu Yan (SUNY Buffalo),
Gregg de Young (American University of Cairo)
Baichun Zhang (Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Organizer Bios:
Nahyan Fancy is the al-Qasimi Professor of Islamic Studies at the Institute of Arab and
Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He also currently serves as the Secretary of the
Commission on the History of Science and Technology in Islamic Societies (CHOSTIS). An
historian and philosopher of science by training, he works on the intersection of medicine,
philosophy and religion during the post-1200 period in Islamic societies. His publications
include Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt: Ibn al-Nafīs, Pulmonary Transit and Bodily
Resurrection (Routledge, 2013), a recently edited roundtable on “Current Debates and
Emerging Trends in the History of Science in Premodern Islamicate Societies” in History of
Science (2023), and over a dozen articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a
monograph that examines and contextualizes discussions in theoretical
medicine/physiology across 8 Arabic commentaries produced on Avicenna’s Canon of
Medicine (and its abridgment, The Epitome of Medicine) between 1170 and 1520.
Matteo Martelli is full professor in History of Science at the University of Bologna, where
he teaches history of ancient science and technology along with history of ancient
medicine. He has served as vice-president (2020-2023) of the Italian Society of the History
of Science (SISS) and has been member of the council (2017-2023) of the International
Academy of the History of Sciences. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman and Byzantine
science – with particular attention to alchemy and medicine (pharmacology) – and its
reception in the Syro-Arabic tradition. His publications include The Four Books of Pseudo
Democritus (London: Routledge, 2014) and Collecting Recipes. Byzantine and Jewish
Pharmacology in Dialogue (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017; edited with L. Lehmhaus). In the
framework of his ERC project AlchemEast, he is currently working on a critical edition and
translation of the alchemical books by Zosimus of Panopolis as they are preserved in the
Syriac tradition.
Michael Stanley-Baker is an historian of Chinese medicine and religion at Nanyang
Technological University, editor of the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine and
Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, and vice-president of the International Association
for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM). His work has covered the emergence
of the Chinese medical tradition, and poly-epistemy in early imperial China, covering topics
like the fundamental notion of qi 氣, as well as the early emergence of the pharmacopoiec
tradition, the bencao 本草. His digital humanities project, Polyglot Asian Medicine,
provides primary sources and analytical tools which further the study of the migration and
cross-disciplinary understanding of traditional Asian medicines. It creates digital links
between the philological, the botanical, the geographic and the bioactive study of Asian
medicines, allowing researchers to link across divers contemporary knowing styles.
Baichun Zhang is the head of the Research Center for the History of Science and
Technology at Nankai University, and former director of CAS’ Institute for the History of
Natural Sciences (IHNS) where he is still a professor of history of science and technology.
His work focuses on the history of machines and instruments, the history of mechanics, the
trans-cultural transmission of scientific knowledge, as well as the transfer and innovation
of technology. His first book was on the history of mechanical engineering and machine
building industry in modern China (1840-1949). He has worked extensively on traditional
Chinese machinery. In terms of trans-cultural transmission, his work has examined the
influence of European knowledge upon Chinese instrument-constructing at the royal
astronomical institution during the 17-18th centuries. In collaboration with scholars from
Germany and other countries, he was involved in a major research program on the
development of mechanical knowledge in China and its interaction with other cultural
traditions. He has also co-authored a book on technology transfer from the Soviet Union to
China. He is a member of several professional societies, including the International
Academy of the History of Science, the Permanent Commission for History of Mechanism
and Machine Science, and the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society (2011-present),
while also serving on the editorial boards of Science in Context, Boston Studies in the Philosophy
and History of Science, Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum, amongst others.
