Project coordinators
Giulia Falato, University of Oxford
Giulia Falato works as a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, China Centre and as a Senior College Lecturer at University College, Oxford. She was awarded a PhD in Asian and African civilisations, East Asia Curriculum at Sapienza University of Rome in 2017. Her main research interest lies in the history of Sino-Western cultural relations, with a particular focus on exchanges in the fields of pedagogy, moral philosophy and lexical innovations. She also works on educational theories and practices in early imperial and medieval China. Her recent publications include a study on Tang booklets for women education, a book chapter about the Jesuit translations strategies in late Ming and early Qing publications, and the monograph based on her doctoral dissertation on Alfonso Vagnone S.J.’s Tongyou jiaoyu 童幼教育 (On the Education of Children, c. 1632, Brill series Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia, June 2020). She is also the co-editor of a volume in Italian language titled: Virtuous Youngsters and Where to Find Them: Educational Path and Representations of Young People in the Chinese Pedagogical and Literary Traditions (On the Road to Cathay series, Martino Martini Centre, Nov. 2022).
Renata Vinci, University of Palermo
Renata Vinci is Associate Professor at University of Palermo. She received her PhD in 2017 at the Department of Oriental Studies of Sapienza University of Rome, after one-year joint-fellowship at Fudan University. Her research focused on the evolution of the knowledge on Italy in the Chinese newspaper Shenbao (1872-1911). From 2017 to 2020, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Roma Tre University, where she worked on western fiction in translation in Chinese modern press. During her postdoc, she was also visiting researcher at the Chinese Institute of Heidelberg University.
She works on the modern periodical press, with a focus on the Sino-Western contacts, the relations between Italy and China, and the diffusion of translations of Western literature in late imperial time. She is author of La Sicilia in Cina (Sicily in China, 2019), a study on the representations of the Mediterranean island in Imperial times as a relevant case-study in the perspective of the circulation of Western knowledge in China. She is also co-editor of two volumes in Italian: Chinese and Italian Scholars in Dialogue on Language, Literature and Travel (2021) and Virtuous Youngsters and Where to Find Them: Educational Path and Representations of Young People in the Chinese Pedagogical and Literary Traditions (2022).
Investigators
Elisa Frei, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt – Boston College
Elisa Frei is Assistant Professor of Church History at the faculty of Catholic Theology of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She also works as a project assistant for the Digital Indipetae Database, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, and is a research associate at the University of York. Her first monograph, Early Modern Litterae Indipetae for East Asia, will be published in 2023 by Brill in the Jesuit Studies series. She is the author of several published essays on Jesuit missions and co-editor of the eight-volume series Asia by the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli.
Laura Lettere, University of Naples L’Orientale
Laura Lettere is 2020 Postdoctoral Fellow, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. She studied Sanskrit and Chinese at La Sapienza, her MA thesis on the Buddhacarita received the 2012 Anna De Sio national award for best thesis in Religious Studies. She received her Ph.D. at La Sapienza, in joint supervision with the Centre of Buddhist Studies at Ghent University and in joint fellowship with Fudan University, Department of Chinese Studies. Her research project on the translation of the Buddhacarita was awarded the 2020 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is currently part of the research team on the ongoing project “Modelli e dinamiche di trasmissione del buddhismo in Asia” at the University of Naples, L’Orientale. Her research interests include Buddhist translation activities in Medieval China (with a focus on the fourth and fifth century) and their influence on Chinese literature, the origin of Chan Buddhism and contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism. She is a trained and licensed teacher of Mandarin for young learners, and co-author of La civiltà cinese, a three-volume course on Chinese civilization and literature for high school students. Her articles are featured on Journal of Chinese Religions, Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni, Rivista di studi orientali, Sulla via del Catai.
Arianna Magnani, Kore University of Enna
Arianna Magnani is a RtdA researcher in Chinese Languages and Literature at the University “Kore” of Enna, where she teaches the courses of History of Asia and Chinese Language in the Bachelor Degree Program in Modern Languages and Cultures.
Having graduated from the University of Turin studying Chinese and Japanese languages, she then obtained her PhD in Asian and African studies at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, with a thesis entitled “Gewu bu qiu ren, a Popular Chinese Encyclopedia in the Jesuit Library in Genoa: A Case Study in the Dynamics of Relations between Europe and China in the Baroque Age”. Her research interests focus primarily on cultural exchanges between China and Europe in the late Ming and early Qing periods, tracing and analyzing the documents and collections of Chinese books still preserved nowadays in European libraries. Her passion always remains the Jesuits’ intercultural work and encyclopedic texts riyong leishu 日用类书, but archive research is another of her great interests. Among her publications: “Searching for Sirenes in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Fantastic Taxonomies of Anthropomorphic Fish in Chinese Texts and Jesuit Sources” (Sulla Via del Catai”, 2022, XV-26); Enciclopedismo cinese in Europa: percorsi transculturali del sapere tra Seicento e Settecento” (Chinese Encyclopedism in Europe: Transcultural Paths of Knowledge between the 17th and 18th cent.) (De Ferrari, 2020).
Kazue Mino, Meiji Gakuin University
Kazue Mino is Visiting Research Fellow at Institute for Christian Studies, Meiji Gakuin University. Her research interest lies in the history of Christianity in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era, with a particular focus on the interaction between the missiological works of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary Campbell N. Moody (1865–1940) and the Taiwanese Church autonomy movements in the late 1920s and 1930s. She completed her PhD study at Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University in 2016, which resulted in the publication of her dissertation by Shinkyo Publishing Company the following year. Between 2017 and 2019, she carried out her postdoctoral research based at New College, the University of Edinburgh. Other topics of interest include Taiwanese identity, Christianity and anti-colonial movements, and Scottish experience of the British Empire.
Giuseppe Rizzuto, University of Florence
Giuseppe Rizzuto is highchool teacher of Chinese Language and PhD candidate in Comparative Languages, Literatures and Cultures, curriculum “Linguistics and Oriental Studies”, at University of Florence. From 2019 to 2021 he was adjunct professor of Chinese language at University of Palermo.
He graduated from University of Bologna in Cultural Anthropology (2009) and in Chinese Language and Culture (2013). His research interests mainly include mobility processes between Italy and China and the connection between education and Chinese society. His publications explore the dynamics of Chinese identity construction in the transnational processes and the evolution of Chinese modern education, with a focus on works of Ye Shengtao. His current research, characterised by an ethnographic approach, is about the learning and maintenance of Chinese language among young people with Chinese origins in Palermo.
Elizabeth Smithrosser, Leiden University
Elizabeth Smithrosser is a scholar of late imperial Chinese publishing culture and intellectual history. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is currently Lecturer at Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University. Her first book, The Misadventures of Master Mugwort: A Joke Book Trilogy from Imperial China will be published with Oxford University Press in Autumn 2023, and she writes a monthly column on Tang-Song history for Medievalists.net. Her 2022 article “Un-learning the Stratagems: Qing Pedagogical Efforts against Poisonous Warring States Legacies” in Virtuous Youngsters and Where to Find Them: Educational Path and Representations of Young People in the Chinese Pedagogical and Literary Traditions explored the efforts of Qing Confucian pedagogue Lu Longqi 陸隴其 (1630–1692) to sanitize the age-old text Stratagems of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 戰國策), which he believed was corrupting the youth of his day.