Eugenio Menegon 梅歐金 (B.A. in Oriental Languages & Literatures, University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, Italy; M.A. in Asian Studies and Ph.D. in History, University of California at Berkeley, USA) teaches Chinese history and world history in the Department of History at Boston University, and was Director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia in 2012-2015. He is jointly appointed in History and at the BU School of Theology (Center for Global Christianity and Mission). His interests include Chinese-Western relations in late imperial times, Chinese religions and Christianity in China, Chinese science, the intellectual history of Republican China, the history of maritime Asia, and Chinese food history. He has been Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Boston University Humanities Center Junior and Senior Fellow, a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, and Berenson Fellow at Villa ‘I Tatti’ (Florence).
His latest book, entitled Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard Asia Center Publication Programs and Harvard University Press, 2009; recipient of the 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies), centers on the life of Catholic communities in Fujian province between 1630 and the present.
His current project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the academic year 2015-16, he began to work on this book project as a member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (Fall 2015) and as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College (Spring 2016). For this project he was also the recipient of a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant for 2016-17. In 2022 (Jan.-June) he was a Berenson Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies – Villa “I Tatti” (Florence) as part of the research program “Italy in the World.” He was Invited Visiting Scholar at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of the University of Venice “Ca’ Foscari” for summer 2023.
