Peter L. Lee Endowed Lectureship

Florence Hsia earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies at Princeton University and a PhD in History at the University of Chicago. She is now Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also currently serving as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in Arts & Humanities and as Associate Dean in the Graduate School.  She is the author of Sojourners in a strange land:  Jesuits and their scientific missions in late imperial China (Chicago, 2009), and has focused on the history of Jesuit science in the context of the Society of Jesus’ global missions in the early modern period. Current areas of interest include data practices in astronomy and indexing methods for Chinese characters.

From its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit episode in late imperial China framed a meeting of distinct scientific traditions, from concepts of earth and sky to modes of reckoning time and space. The encounter challenged members of the Society of Jesus to rethink how to best advance missions both religious and scientific, and to address how pursuing these intertwined goals might shape their own identities. This talk explores the long history of Jesuit scientific work in the Celestial Empire in order to better understand what such efforts meant for the Jesuits’ various audiences, as well as for themselves.

Chin-Hao Huang is associate professor of political science at Yale-NUS College. His research and teaching focus on Chinese foreign policy, the international relations of East Asia, and international security. He is the recipient of the Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia (2018-2019) and the American Political Science Association’s Foreign Policy Section Best Paper Award (2014). Huang’s latest research has been published in such disciplinary and field-relevant journals as International Organization; Cambridge Review of International Affairs; Foreign Policy Analysis; The China Quarterly; and Asian Survey, among others. He is the author or co-author of three books, including his latest manuscript, “Power and Restraint in China’s Rise” (Columbia University Press, 2022).

Featuring a presentation by Chin-Hao Huang about his recently published book with David Kang, “State Formation through Emulation: The East Asian Model” (Cambridge University Press, 2022).  Neither war nor preparations for war were the cause or effect of state formation in historical East Asia. Instead, emulation of China—the hegemon with a civilizational influence—drove the rapid formation of centralized, bureaucratically administered, territorial governments in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, all of which occurred a thousand years earlier than Europe. Furthermore, East Asian countries engaged in state-building not to spur conflict or to suppress revolt. In fact, war was relatively rare and there was no balance of power system with regular existential threats—the longevity of the East Asian dynasties is evidence of both the peacefulness of their neighborhood and their internal stability. Huang and Kang challenge the assumption that the European experience with war and state-making was universal. More importantly, they broaden the scope of state formation in East Asia beyond the study of China itself and show how countries in the region interacted and learned from each other and China to develop strong capacities and stable borders.