From August 1, 2013, the sinologist Dagmar Schäfer will be a new director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, where she will head Department III. The new department will research the history of artefacts, action and knowledge. Research cases will include but not be confined to Asian cultures and the premodern era.
From August 1, 2013, the sinologist Dagmar Schäfer will be a new director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, where she will head Department III. The new department will research the history of artefacts, action and knowledge. Research cases will include but not be confined to Asian cultures and the premodern era.
Dagmar Schäfer is director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and chair of Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. A specialist in the history of Chinese science and technology, she received her PhD from the University of Würzburg, Germany, in 1996, and worked and studied at Zhejiang University and Ts’inghua University in China, at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. Her publications include The Crafting of the 10,000 Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in China (Brill, 2012). Her monograph The Crafting of the 10,000 Things received the renowned Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society in 2012 and the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900 category) of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013.
The main research focus of the new Department III at the MPIWG will be on materiality, the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems, and the changing role of artefacts — texts, objects and spaces — in the creation, diffusion and use of scientific and technological knowledge.
more information: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
