Spring Lectures and Summer Plans from Prof. Menegon

Facets of Religious and Cultural History in Early Modern China: Lectures by Professor Eugenio Menegon, Spring and Summer 2019

Spring 2019

Professor Menegon standing in front of the Collège de France, Paris

Professor Eugenio Menegon (Chinese and World History) gave three public lectures during the past 2019 spring semester.

During the BU spring break, on March 13, 2019, he offered at the University of California at Berkeley, his doctoral alma mater, the Berkeley Lecture in Public Theology on the topic “What’s Theology Got to Do with It? An Eighteenth-Century Chinese Emperor Debating Religions and Christianity,” sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion, the History Department and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

On April 9, 2019, as part of the conference “Questions de religion à l’époque moderne” at the Collège de France in Paris, Chair of Early Modern Global History (Prof. Sanjay Subrahmanyam), he presented a lecture entitled Jouissez du temps présent: Religion and the State in Late Imperial China, 1500-1800.”  The Collège de France is the oldest and most prestigious institution of advanced research in France, established in 1530.

Finally, on April 26, 2019, within the Roundtable Discussion on “Material Cultures of Devotion in Early Modern Jesuit Missions” organized by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and Burns Library at Boston College, he spoke on “Healing and Converting: The Power of Sacred Objects in the China Jesuit Mission.”

The square in front of the Collège is dedicated to one of its members, Michel Foucault

Summer 2019

For Summer 2019, Prof. Menegon plans to present at several venues in Asia and the United States.

On June 10, 2019, together with his collaborators in the BU DH Project “The China Christian Database,” he will attend a workshop on a new digital project mapping the tens of thousands of Jesuit missionary letters of applications for the ‘Indies’ (Indipetae) preserved in the archives in Rome, organized by Prof. Emanuele Colombo (DePaul University, Chicago) at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College.

He will then travel to China, presenting first a paper on June 13-15, 2019 on “Beijing as a Missionary Translation Center in the Eighteenth Century,” at the conference Crossing Borders: Sinology in Translation Studies,” Department of Translation & Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

After visiting the former Portuguese colony and early modern missionary hub of Macau and its archives, he will be a guest speaker at the Study Center on Canton and Foreign Cultural Relations, Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University, Guangzhou (invited by Prof. Thierry Meynard).

Finally, on June 23, 2019, he will present on Qing Religious Diplomacy with Europe and the Idea of ‘Court’ from the Kangxi to the Qianlong reigns at the sixth annual workshop on Ming-Qing Catholicism, “The Transformation of Thought and Foreign Culture during the Ming and Qing Periods,” organized by Shanghai University (invited by Prof. Xiao Qinghe).

 After returning from Asia, he will lecture on the topics of “Christianity in early modern East Asia,” and “European traders in early modern China” at the Summer InstituteEast Asia in the Early Modern World” for secondary teachers organized by the Teaching East Asia initiative and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia at the University of Colorado at Boulder, July 7-11, 2019.