Investigation of the construction of integrating world views Vrije Universiteit Brussel
(1) The construction of a model of the world: research ...
What can Chinese teach us about the languages of Europe? Sociolinguistic research has obtained important insights into the dynamics of the languages of Europe: the emergence of pluricentric varieties, the global influence of English, the tendency towards informalization of the standard languages. But are these phenomena typically European, or are the same forces at work in other linguistic areas? A comparison with Chinese may provide an ...
Before chemical inputs were invented, food was mainly produced in an ecological way. In the 1980s, China developed the capacity to build its own fertilizer plants, and since then, to sustain a growing population and maintain producers competitivity under market conditions, chemical fertilisers were largely used in food production to increase yields. Due to insufficient government supervision, food safety remains a prominent problem in ...
A unique characteristic of the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth century is the intercultural communication circuit of books: European books travelling to China and being translated and published into Chinese, and in return Chinese books travelling to Europe and being stored into European libraries. What shape did this communication circuit take? What are the characteristics of the intercultural books produced ...
My dissertation seeks to study how French and Chinese images of each other through the lens of food informed Sino-French encounters from the late 16th to the mid-18th centuries. It dissects representations of food authored by French and Chinese intermediaries in order to study the relationships between knowledge production, identity and imperial power politics that undergirded Sino-French encounters before the European power dominance by the ...
This research project investigates the development of early “Records of the Transmission of the Lamp” (ch. chuándēnglù傳燈錄) and how Chán Buddhist circles of the 10th and 11th centuries “thought and wrote" (cf. McRae 2000: 53) about the concept of buddha-nature. The texts under examination are:
This project investigates the early modern formations of geo-spatial knowledge in late imperial China through the lens of artefacts such as maps, atlases, globes, geographical treatises, etc. It raises the question of how we can gauge the scale and scope of geospatial knowledge in late imperial China in a global frame, in order to rediscover their multiple origins and trace connections that reached across the globe. What determined the reach ...
I would like to create time and space to focus on the rework of my dissertation on the 1997 Chinese and Taiwanese media coverage Hong Kong transfer. Due to circumstances this assignment was postponed. It would give me great satisfaction if I can still rework the manuscript and supplement for a book publication in 2022, 25 years after the transfer. This is one rewriting a bulky thesis with a reduction of each chapter and immediately also ample ...