Department of History (CUHK)

LI Yitian holds a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University and an MA and a BA in History from Tsinghua University. She is a historian of Middle-Period China, working at the intersection of intellectual, social, and digital history. Her current book project examines the intellectual history of Chinese statecraft from Song to Ming. Pairing distant reading of encyclopedic compendia with close reading of sources ranging from classical exegesis to legal documents and local writings, the project traces how the intellectual community reimagined governance in an alternative framework to both the actual practices of the state and the Neo-Confucian paradigm of moral philosophy, a framework which had the potential to shape the development of the early modern state. She is also interested in the interactions of knowledge systems in the global context.