Dagmar Schäfer 薛鳳
Partner
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Working group: Global Synergies/Asynergies
Dagmar Schäfer is Director of the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as Honorary Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Northwest University, Xi’an. Before taking up her current positions, she was Chair of China Studies and History of Technology at the University of Manchester (2011-2015). A sinologist and historian of technology and science she has published widely on the premodern history of China (Song-Ming), materiality, and the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems. In 2020 Dagmar Schäfer was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for her development of new approaches to cultural studies and the resulting comparative perspectives on a comprehensive global history. Her monograph The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), received the Pfizer Award and Joseph Levenson Book Prize. Recent publications include Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023), coedited with Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning; and Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues (Brill, 2023), coedited with Glenn W. Most and Mårten Söderblom Saarela.