Lianbin Dai

Lianbin Dai is a distinguished historian specializing in late imperial China, with particular expertise in book history, reading practices, bibliography, and textual scholarship. His academic credentials include a BA from Nankai University, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a D.Phil from Oxford University. His scholarly work has focused significantly on the influence of Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi's reading theory and its impact on Ming dynasty elite readers, as explored in his doctoral thesis "Books, Reading, and Knowledge in Ming China". His career includes notable positions as College Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and curator at the University of Alberta Museums' Mactaggart Art Collection. As the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at York Centre for Asian Research, he worked on his manuscript "Learning to Be Learned: Scholarly Reading and Knowledge in the Late Imperial Chinese Humanities," examining how Zhu Xi's rationalist approach influenced knowledge practices and intellectual attitudes in late imperial China. His research continues to illuminate the complex relationships between reading practices, knowledge formation, and intellectual culture in traditional China.