FLORIN-STEFAN MORAR 孟瀚良

Dr. Morar received his PhD from Harvard University in 2019. Dr. Morar has broad linguistic training with working knowledge and philological competence in a number of European and East Asian Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Manchu, and Chinese. He uses these linguistics abilities to research the relations and cross-cultural exchanges between China and the West in the past and the present. Dr. Morar has published on the history of translation of scientific and technological knowledge. Currently, he is finishing a monograph on the translation of cartographic knowledge between China and the West in the age of first contacts. Dr. Morar is also active in the areas of Digital Humanities and Computer Aided Translation.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• History of Science
  
• Global History
• History of Translation
• Digital Humanities
• Computer Aided Translation and Machine Learning

JOURNAL ARTICLES

• “First Encounters: Early European Attempts to Translate the Chinese language in the 16th Century,” in Translation and Interpreting Studies (forthcoming 2023)
• “Relocating the Qing in the Global History of Science: The Manchu Translation of the 1603 World Map of Matteo Ricci and Li Yingshi,”, in Isis: Journal of the History of Science, 109:4, 2018, 679-694.
• “The Westerner: Matteo Ricci’s World Map and the Quandaries of European Identity in the Late Ming Dynasty,” in Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6 (2019), 14-30.
• “Reinventing Machines: The Transmission History of the Leibniz Calculator,” The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 48, 1, 2015 (doi:10.1017/ S0007087414000429).

BOOK CHAPTERS

• “China translata: The 1555 Map of Advantageous Terrain Then and Now” in: Cams & Papelitzki (eds.), Remapping the world from Asia, University of Hawaii Press, feb. 2024 (forthcoming)
• “Science in China: Key Problems, Topics and Methodologies” in: Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies, Routledge 2021

SHORT CONTRIBUTIONS

• “Historicism” in: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley and Blackwell, 2018
• “Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius,” “Semitecolo’s telescope,” “The Pantograph” and “Machina Coelestis” in: Paper worlds, Printing knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Harvard Collection of Scientific Instruments, 2010

BOOK REVIEWS

• “The Nature of Natural Classification: Review of Federico Marcon, Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, University of Chicago Press, 2019” in Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 34, 3 (November 2019).
• “Review of Dominic Sachsenmeier, The Global Entanglements of a Man who never Travelled, Columbia University Press, 2018” in Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6 (2019), 510-12.

TALKS AND PRESENTATIONS

• “Islamic Maps as mediators of knowledge in the cartographic exchanges between China and the West” Georgetown in Qatar, Qatar,Jan. 24, 2023
• “New Frontiers in the History of Science,” Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Dec. 12, 2022
• “History of Translation between China and the West,” Translation Symposium, Lingnan University, June 2022
• “Towards a Global History of the World Map: The Translation and Circulation of Cartographic Knowledge in Sino-Western Encounters,” Chinese University of Hong Kong, 18 Feb. 2022
  
• “At the limits of China: frontiers, borders, and political geography in early modern Sino-Western cartographic exchanges,” Cambridge Seminars in the History of Cartography, Cambridge University, Nov. 16, 2021
• “Cartographies, Real and Imagined: Polo, Rici, Calvino,” Harvard University, 13 Apr. 2021
  
• "Cartography and the Global Renaissance"(Guest Lecture), Yale-National University of Singapore, Apr. 9, 2021
  
• "What kind of history of science?," (Invited talk), University of Macao, Macao S.A.R. China, Nov. 13, 2020
  
• “The 1555 Map of Advantageous Terrain Past and Present Gu jin xing sheng zhi tu 古 今形勝之圖 and the Jesuit Maps of China in Comparative Perspective,” Conference Displacing Worldviews: Maps and Mapping between Western Europe and East Asia, Macao S.A.R. China, Aug. 29, 2020
• “Presentation in the experimental panel Technologies of Violence,” Society for the History of Technology Conference, Milan, Italy, Oct., 2019 
• “Connected Histories of Cartography and the Formation of World Geography in the Time of the Renaissance,” Mahindra Center for the Humanities, Harvard University, Cambridge, US, Feb. 2019
• “The translation of cartographic knowledge between China, Inner Asia, and Early modern Europe” Lecture in the Ricci Institute Research Seminar Series, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA, Aug. 2017 
• “Columbus' crew: on the power of the weak in the globalization of knowledge,” Villa I Tatti exploratory seminar, Florence, Italy, May, 2017 
• “Cartographic translation,” Harvard-Princeton early modern graduate student conference, Princeton, NJ, USA, Feb., 2017
• “Relocating the early Qing in the global history of science,” in the panel "Knowledge in Translation between East Asia and Europe Renaissance Society of America Conference,” Chicago, USA, Mar., 2017
• “Translation and treason: the demarcation controversy and Abraham Ortelius’ map of China from 1584” Invited Lecture in the Maps and Society Series, Warburg Institute, London,UK, March, 2017
• “Materiality and cartographic translation” in the panel "New Approaches in the study of early modern material texts" History of Science Society Meeting, Atlanta GE, USA, October, 2016.  
• “Poisons and the drug ecologies of opium,” American Association for the History of Medicine, Chicago, USA 2014 
• “Technoscience limited: how patent law and court experts define the boundary between science and technology” Ecole Normale Supérieure Philosophy department conference: "Le contrôle des experts,” Paris, France, 2010