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FLORIN-STEFAN MORAR 孟瀚良


Dr. Morar received his PhD from Harvard University in 2019 and is currently Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. 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. Dr. Morar is also active in the areas of Digital Humanities and History of A.I.



RESEARCH INTERESTS



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



JOURNAL ARTICLES



  • “Unintended Experiment: Capitalism and the History of Education in Colonial Hong Kong, 1842–1945.” International Politics, July 8, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-024-00586-5.

  • “First encounters: The earliest approaches to translating and interpreting the Chinese language in the early modern period.” Translation and Interpreting Studies Journal 18, no. 1 (2023): 139-58. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20052.mor.

  • “The Westerner: Matteo Ricci’s World Map and the Quandaries of European Identity in the Late Ming Dynasty.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 6 (2019): 14-30. https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00601002.

  • “Relocating the Qing in the Global History of Science: The Manchu Translation of the 1603 World Map by Li Yingshi and Matteo Ricci.” Isis: Journal of the History of Science 109, no. 4 (2018): 679-694. https://doi.org/10.1086/701475.

  • “Reinventing Machines: The Transmission History of the Leibniz Calculator.” The British Journal for the History of Science 48, no. 1 (2015): 1. https://doi:10.1017/S0007087414000429.


BOOK CHAPTERS




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



  • “Asia in the Making of the Global Renaissance: Perspectives from Religion, Literature, History & Art” (roundtable presentation), Renaissance Society of America Conference, Boston, USA, Mar. 20, 2025

  • “Borderlines: Korea’s relations with China and Japan in geopolitical and global historical perspective” (public lecture), Sukmyung University, Seoul, Korea, Mar. 14, 2025

  • “The Book Thief: A Microhistory of the Sino-Western Knowledge Exchanges in the Global Renaissance” (public lecture), Hong Kong University, Hong Kong S.A.R, Dec. 11, 2024

  • “Islamic Maps as mediators of knowledge in the cartographic exchanges between China and the West” (invited lecture) Georgetown in Qatar, Qatar, Jan. 24, 2023

  • “New Frontiers in the History of Science,” (invited lecture) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Dec. 12, 2022

  • “AI and the limits of artificial intelligence,” (invited talk) Lingnan University Arts Faculty Research Seminar Series, Hong Kong, Nov. 29, 2022

  • “History of Translation between China and the West,” (invited talk) 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,” (public lecture) 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,” (invited talk) Cambridge Seminars in the History of Cartography, Cambridge University, Nov. 16, 2021

  • “Cartographies, Real and Imagined: Polo, Rici, Calvino,” (invited talk) 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