Director of Undergraduate Studies; Associate Professor of History
Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, intellectual history of Republican China, history of maritime Asia, Chinese food history
Eugenio Menegon has published extensively on the history of Chinese-Western relations, and is the author of two books, Un solo Cielo. Giulio Aleni S.J., 1582-1649. Geografia, arte, scienza, religione dall’Europa alla Cina, (One Heaven. Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649). Geography, art, science, religion from Europe to China, Brescia, Grafo Edizioni, 1994); and Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard Asia Center Publication Programs and Harvard University Press, 2009), recipient of the 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize in Chinese Studies His current book project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries.
Menegon has been Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Junior and Senior Fellow at the BU Humanities Foundation, and An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. He has held appointments as visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, the University “L’Orientale” in Naples, the University of Padua, and the Cini Foundation, Venice. He was Director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia (BUCSA) in 2012-15, and co-organized the research group “Leisure and Social Change across Asia” under the auspices of the BU Humanities Foundation, and the interdepartmental “Eurasian Court Cultures Workgroup” at Boston University. He is currently a member of the BU Travel Literature Reading Group.
His teaching passions are the history of late imperial and modern China, the toolkit of the historian’s craft, and the exploration of intercultural relations in pre-modern times.
During the academic year 2015-16, he was on research leave to work on his current book project as a member of the School of Historical Study, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (Fall 2015) and as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College (Spring 2016). For this project he is also the recipient of a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant for 2016-17.