Dror Weil is an Assistant Professor in History of Early Modern Asia (East Asia and the Islamicate World) at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study during the academic year 2024/2025. Dror graduated from Princeton University in 2016 with the dissertation „"The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China's Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge of the Natural World, 16th-18th Centuries" under the guidance of Prof. Michael Cook and Prof. Benjamin Elman. He has held academic positions and fellowships at Kings College London, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Tel Aviv University, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris and Marseille. 

His research and publications explore the accommodation and translation of Arabo-Persian texts in late medieval and early modern China (13^th-18^th centuries) as part of scientific, medical and religious exchanges between the Islamicate world and East Asia during that period.  His recent publications include: "Crossing Boundaries: The Accommodation of Mirṣād al-‘Ibad in Early Modern China," International Journal of Asian Studies (2024) and "Collation and Articulation of Arabo-Persian Scientific Texts in Early Modern China," in Routledge Handbook on Science in the Islamicate World (2023).

Mid-16th century China saw a surprising emergence of a network of local savants who shared an interest in the exploration of Arabic and Persian texts. To that end, they undertook extensive searches for Arabic and Persian manuscripts, forgotten in libraries or newly brought to China along a growing influx of foreign visitors, and meticulously studied their contents. My talk will tell the rather unique story of the hundreds of Arabic and Persian works that circulated in China between the 16th and 18th centuries. It will explore the scholarly practices by which Chinese savants read, interpreted, and remade Arabo-Persian works, while bridging the cultural, linguistic and epistemic differences. It will shed light on some of the inherent challenges of domesticating a foreign textual archive at the margins of a literary tradition, and the incentives to transform the traditional manuscript-based scholarship into print.