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. He is also co-investigator for the digital humanities project China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) at the BU Center for Global Christianity and Mission.
Menegon has been Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Junior and Senior Fellow at the BU Humanities Foundation, An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, and Berenson Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Villa “I Tatti.” He is a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and joint faculty at the BU School of Theology. 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, the Cini Foundation, “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice, and other institutions in Asia and Europe. In recent years, he has been the recipient of research grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (Taiwan), the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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.