Phd in HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, RELIGIONS

email: elisabetta.corsi@uniroma1.it
phone: 23073

Elisabetta Corsi is Chair Professor of Sinology at the Department of History, Culture and Religions of Sapienza, State University of Rome. She received her undergraduate training in Art History and Chinese studies at Sapienza. She carried out graduate studies at Beijing University and conducted research in Hong Kong and Bombay. She earned her PhD in Sinology at Sapienza. She has lectured on Classical Chinese and History of Sinology at the Colmex from 1994 until 2007 (read about El Colegio de México at http://www.colmex.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=54 )), ), when she joined the Faculty of Arts at Sapienza. She was invited to present and conduct research in several institutions, among which are the Centre for Chinese Studies (Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin), Taibei, the Research Institute for Qing History (Qingshi yanjiusuo) of the People‘s University, the Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, Harvard University, the Getty Research Institute,The Pennsylvania State University and the University of Sevilla. She is currently a visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University. She received research grants from the CCK Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (North America Branch, 1998-2000, the Consejo National para la Ciencia y Tecnologia (Mexico, 2000-2005), the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR), 2005-2007 and Sapienza (2011, 2012, 2015). From February 2012 she served as JRS Panel member in the field of the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong. >From February 2015 she serves as Deputy Chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel.
Her research interests focus on the role of Jesuit missionaries as scientific and artistic mediators during the early modern period, mainly in the field of "mixed mathematics" - such as optics and linear perspective - and on the transmission of Aristotelian natural philosophy through the production, translation and circulation of printed works, mainly in Classical Chinese. She is member of the Sapienza Quality Assurance Team and a founding member of the Quality & Innovation in Teaching Workgroup. She lectures on Chinese textual and exegetical traditions, reference tools and classification of knowledge in ancient China, as well as on material culture and connoisseurship in late imperial China, the relationship between technology and science, history of the book and printing, history of reading and writing, history of sinology.
She has published extensively in English, Spanish, Italian and Chinese. She is author of La fábrica de las ilusiones. Los jesuitas y la difusión de la perspectiva lineal en China (México 2004. A revised enlarged edition in English under the title of Fabricating Illusions. The Jesuits and the Dissemination of Linear Perspective in China (1698-1766) is forthcoming), and Órdenes religiosas entre América y Asia. Ideas para una historia misionera de los espacios coloniales (México 2008).
She is an amateur baroque singer and harpsichordist.