About
The Ricci Insitute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College is an internationally renowned research center for the study of Chinese-Western cultural exchange.
What We Do
With a focus on the Jesuit missions of the 16th–19th centuries and the history of Christianity in China and East Asia, the Institute supports research on a diverse range of interests:
- Chinese and East Asian history and relations with Europe
- the influences of China and Europe on each other
- Eastern and Western religion, culture, and philosophy
- science and technology, including astronomy, cartography, and medicine
Visiting scholars from around the world meet here to examine these and many other topics in languages ranging fromLatin, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Spanish to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Manchu. We regularly host meetings, symposia, conferences, and workshops, and every summer our visiting scholars and research fellows-in-residence speak at our weekly seminars on their topic of study.
We provide scholars with timely and high-quality service for their research and academic collaborations with other colleagues and institutions. Whether you're a graduate student or a faculty member continuing your research, we offer our entire library and scholarly network to you.
People
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J., D.Phil., Oxon
Director & Provost's Fellow
Fr. M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. received his doctorate from the University of Oxford and his Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Gregorian University in Rome. His academic focus is on the relationship between Europe and East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with an emphasis on Christianity in Japan and comparative studies of the Jesuit mission in Japan and China. He has authored and edited multiple works, including Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Comparison, 1543–1644 (2009) and The Samurai and the Cross: The Jesuit Enterprise in Premodern Japan (2022).
Xiaoxin Wu 吳小新, Ed.D.
Director of Research
Dr. Xiaoxin Wu received his Ed.D. in International and Multicultural Education from the University of San Francisco. His research focus is on the history of Christianity and Christian education in China, as well as archival resource development for the study of these topics. His recent publications include: Encounters and Dialogues: Changing Perspectives on Chinese-Western Exchanges from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Institut Monumenta Serica, 2004), Christianity in China: A Scholar's Guide to Resources in the Libraries and Archives of the United States, 2nd ed. (M.E. Sharpe, 2009), and 中國基督宗教史料叢刊 (Collections of Historical Sources on Christianity in China, 2011–2014).
Mark Stephen Mir
Archivist & Librarian
Mark received his BA from San Francisco State University and MA in Asia Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco. He has been the Ricci Institute librarian for more than thirty years and is the primary library reference contact for students, faculty, and scholars. He is responsible for the Institute’s library resources, cataloging, collection development, and information technology. He frequently creates library and museum exhibits, supports publishing efforts, and gives talks on East Asian science, technology, and cartography.
Ginny Greeley
Editorial and Academic Program Administrator
Virginia (Ginny) Greeley is the Editorial and Academic Program Administrator. Previously, she worked at Boston College's Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies and the Institute of Jesuit Sources as its Fiscal and Operations Administrator. There, she assisted in the publication of fifteen monographs, two symposia, six academic programs, and fifteen online academic presentations, which hosted over 6,450 participants. She is also the Editor and Secretary of the Benedict XVI Institute for Africa, where she assisted in the publication of two books and three conference proceedings. Ginny earned a Master's Degree in English from Boston College and her research interest is in theology in literature.
Frederik Vermote, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fresno, and Affiliated Research Fellow of the Ricci Institute. He received his BA and MA from KU Leuven and his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2013.
Prof. Vermote studies European relations with Ming-Qing China, Jesuit history, and economic and cultural networks between China, Europe, and the Americas of the early modern period. His current focus is on Jesuit financial networks between China and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His recent publications include London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689 and “The Qing Empire and the Excluded Middle: The Role of the Jesuit Intermediaries during the Treaty of Nerchinsk” in the text From Chinggisid to Qing: Empire in Asia: A New Global History, Vol. 1 (2016).
Lauren Arnold
An independent scholar with degrees in history and art history from the University of Michigan, she has taught and lectured widely on East-West artistic contact and influences. Her works include Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: the Franciscan Mission to China and its Influence on the Art of the West, 1250–1350 (San Francisco: Desiderata Press, 1999).
Dr. Arnold has also explored the world of carpets, rugs, and the symbolism found upon them in lectures from London to Armenia.
Her latest work is a chapter entitled "Christianity in China: Yuan to Qing Dynasties, 13th-20th Centuries" which appears in a new publication, Christianity in Asia: Sacred Art and Visual Splendour, a beautifully illustrated catalog of an exhibition mounted by the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.
Fr. Robert Carbonneau, C.P.
Former Executive Director of the U.S. Catholic China Bureau (USCCB) and an Affiliated Research Fellow of the Ricci Institute, Fr. Carbonneau is a Passionist priest and serves as the Archivist for the Passionist China Collection (PCC), an archive of over 100,000 documents, photographs, reports, films, and correspondence.
Fr. Robert Carbonneau received his Ph.D. in American and East Asian History from Georgetown University and has taught U.S., Chinese, Japanese, world, and Catholic mission history, and frequently gives classes and lectures on the Catholic Church in China and on the use of missionary archives as untapped sources for research. He currently teaches at the University of Scranton. From 2007 to 2008 he taught in Chongqing, China. An expert on the Passionist China mission to twentieth century Hunan, Fr. Robert continues to hold the position of Passionist Historian and Archivist.
Joseph Tsang 曾永燊
Associate Researcher at the Ricci Institute, an Affiliated Research Fellow and Independent Scholar at the Ricci Institute. Mr. Tsang’s research topics include the inculturation of Catholic doctrine in a Chinese environment and the history of ritual and custom in traditional Chinese religious practice.
Mr. Tsang has presented his studies of traditional Chinese funerary and memorial practices of worship and respect from a Catholic perspective at the Ricci Institute Summer Research Seminar, including examples found in various Chinese communities, and raised questions of terminology and development that are of particular interest to younger generations of Chinese Christians. He is currently studying Chinese doctrinal texts written by European Jesuits during the Ming and Qing periods and analyzing their relationship to traditional local practices.
Shu Wei-Ping 許維萍, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Chinese Classics and Literature at Tamkang University in Taipei and a Ricci Institute Visiting Research Fellow. Prof. Shu’s study of the Chinese text Yijing 易經 (or Classic of Changes) led to her studies in Manchu and the Jesuit interpreters of this text for the Kangxi emperor.
Prof. Shu recently presented her research on the French Jesuit Joachim Bouvet’s lessons at a lecture at Fudan University in Shanghai. Prof. Shu was the lead scholar for a 2017 joint research project between the Ricci Institute and Tankang University, which includes an analysis of Malatesta-Robinson papers, a unique collection of Chinese manuscripts that once belonged to the famous British collector, Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) concerning the Jesuit China mission and the Rites controversy.
Dong Shaoxin 董少新, Ph.D.
Professor of History and Associate Director of the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai, and was Fulbright Scholar-in-residence at the Ricci Institute for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Prof. Dong Shaoxin is a leading scholar in Chinese-Western cultural history. His publication Between Body and Soul: A History of Western Medicine in China during the 16th -18th Centuries 行神之间: 早期西洋医学入华史稿 (2008) was recognized by China's Ministry of Education in 2013. His wide-ranging research includes the 17th century Portuguese Jesuit António de Gouvea, the influence of Western medical missions between 1807 and 1911, and traditional medicine and modernization in China.
In November 2016 he presented a paper on Western documents concerning the Ming-Qing dynastic change at the conference “Encounter and Communication: East-West Cultural Exchange since Matteo Ricci.”
Peter Park, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas-Dallas and a Ricci Institute Visiting Scholar, his research at the Ricci Institute related to his study of German Orientalism, comparative linguistics, and German and French Enlightenment thinkers’ views on China.
Dr. Park’s presentation at the Ricci Institute Summer Research Seminar was entitled "Cornelius de Pauw’s Natural History of the Chinese, or How a Minor 'Philosophe' Shattered the Image of China”; in it, he contrasted positive European images of China as illustrated in Jesuit reports with the highly negative impressions of Cornelius de Pauw (1739-1799), a controversial Dutch philosopher and ethnologist.
Dr. Park is the author of Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, winner of the 2016 Frantz Fanon Prize for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought.
Cai Yongliang 蔡永良, Ph.D.
Professor of Linguistics at the Shanghai Maritime University 上海海事大學 and Research Fellow at the Ricci Institute. Prof. Cai’s research concerns methods of language learning and adaptation with a focus on mission schools in late Imperial and early Republican China. His presentation during the 2015 Summer Seminar “Language Politics in Missionary Higher Education in China" compared language teaching policies adopted by St. John's University in Shanghai and contrasted them with Cheeloo University in Shandong Province during the Republican Era in early 20th century China.
Prof. Cai’s research on language and linguistics is now reaching farther back into historical sources documenting Jesuit and other missionary attempts at Chinese language acquisition during the late Ming and early Qing period, their awareness of local dialect and writing practices, and the overriding importance of learning Chinese for the mission enterprise.
Donald L. Baker, Ph.D.
Fall 2018 EDS-Stewart Chair
Professor in Korean History and Civilization, Dr. Baker’s research focuses on classical Joseon dynasty history, with a special focus on philosophical, religious, and scientific change since 1700. He also studies contemporary Korean history, including memory and trauma with regard to the Kwangju Resistance in May 1980 in South Korea. He is also one of the most eminent specialists on the history of Korean Christianity. Co-editor of the Sourcebook of Korean Civilization and editor of Critical Readings on Korean Christianity, he is also the author of Chosŏn hugi yugyo wa ch’ǒnjugyo ŭi taerip [The Confucian confrontation with Catholicism in the latter half of the Joseon dynasty] (1997), Korean Spirituality (2008), and Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea (2017). Dr. Baker helped the Ricci Institute to organize an international symposium in Canada on “Life & Death in the Missions of New France and East Asia: Narratives of Faith & Martyrdom” (2018).
Laura Hostetler, Ph.D.
Fall 2016 EDS-Stewart Chair
Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Dr. Hostetler's research deals with imperial encounters and ethnography in modern Chinese history. Her publications include: Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and The Art of Ethnography: A Miao Album of Guizhou Province (University of Washington Press, 2005). In addition to her own research, Dr. Hostetler co-chaired an international symposium on cartography and cultural exchange at the Ricci Institute in April 2016. The EDS-Stewart Chair is awarded to distinguished scholars of cross-cultural encounters between China and the West.
Fr. Edward J. Malatesta, S.J.
Sr. Mary Celeste Rouleau, R.S.M.
Theodore N. Foss, Ph.D.
The Ricci Institute was founded at the University of San Francisco in 1984 by Fr. Edward J. Malatesta, S.J. (1932-1998), Theodore N. Foss, Ph.D. (born 1950), and Sr. Mary Celeste Rouleau, R.S.M. (1926-2008).
The Institute traces its origins to Fr. Francis Rouleau, S.J. (1901-1984), who taught at the Jesuit Theologate in Shanghai and lived in China from 1929 until 1952. Fr. Rouleau, along with Fr. Thomas Carroll, S.J., had for many years collected and studied materials on early Sino-Western cultural contacts at the Sacred Heart Center in Los Gatos and originally called their endeavor the Sino-Jesuit History Project, with a focus on the Chinese Rites Controversy. After the untimely death of Fr. Carroll, Fr. Edward Malatesta joined Fr. Rouleau to continue the project. Fr. Rouleau’s niece, Sr. Mary Celeste Rouleau, also joined the project as archivist.
In 1982 Fr. Malatesta secured offices at the University of San Francisco’s Lone Mountain Campus and the project archives were moved to the new location. Dr. Theodore N. Foss, Ph.D, joined the team and brought his personal archives to enhance the collection.
The day after Fr. Rouleau's death in 1984, Fr. Malatesta, Dr. Foss, and Sr. Celeste founded the Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History (ICWCH) with the intention of continuing and broadening the long Jesuit tradition of Sinological research. This aim was greatly facilitated by the arrival of the Chinese Library of the Society of Jesus (Bibliotheca Sinensis Societatis Iesu) in 1985, which had been compiled in Hong Kong over many years by the Chinese-Peruvian Jesuit, Fr. Albert Chan, S.J., a Harvard-trained historian of China’s Ming dynasty.
As the Institute grew and worldwide scholarly interest in the field dramatically increased, in 1990 the name was officially changed to the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, better reflecting our approach to research and our international connections with students, scholars, and academic institutions.
The Ricci Institute relocated to Boston College in the fall of 2021, with a view to expanding its outreach to graduate students and senior researchers.
Visit
The Ricci Institute will open at the Creagh Library building at 2125 Commonwealth Avenue, on Boston College’s Brighton Campus by early spring 2022. For further updates, please visit this page again in the coming months.