Dr Dror Weil
BA, MA, PhD
Special Supervisor
College Roles
- Special Supervisor in History
- Special Supervisor in History & Philosophy of Science
University Roles
- Assistant Professor in History of Early Modern Asia in the Faculty of History
Contact
Email: dw612@cam.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Dror Weil is an historian of the pre-modern Asia, with a particular interest in scientific and other textual exchanges between the Islamicate world and China; cultural, intellectual and social histories of Late Imperial China; histories of medicine and science in Asia; and, histories of the book and textuality. Dr Weil studied for his BA degree in East Asian Studies and Economics at Tel Aviv University, and for an MA degree in History at National Chengchi University (政治大學) in Taipei. He earned a PhD degree from Princeton University with a dissertation titled: “The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China’s Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge of the Natural World, 16th-18th Centuries” in 2016. He was a recipient of the Thomas Arthur Arnold Fund for Excellence in Historical Research fellowship at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University in 2017, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge between 2017-2019. Before taking up a university lectureship at Cambridge in 2021, he served as a University Lecturer at the Department of History, King’s College London for two academic years between 2019-2021.
History: Dr Weil currently teaches the following at the Faculty of History:
- Paper 21
- MPhil World History – Core
- MPhil Global Early Modern World paper
- Specific lectures in other papers related to East Asia and the Islamicate world and the global circulation of commodities and ideas during the late medieval and early modern periods.
- From Michaelmas 2022, Dr Weil will teach the Early Modern Europe and the World outline paper.
History & Philosophy of Science: Dr Weil currently teaches four lectures on Islamic and Chinese science and medicine for Part II, Paper I.
Research Interests
Cultural, intellectual and social histories of late medieval and early modern East Asia and the Islamicate world. In particular, Dr Weil’s interests lie in the transmission of scientific ideas and the circulation of texts across Asia; the histories of the astral sciences and medicine in late medieval and early modern East Asia and the Islamicate world; knowledge production in the Mongol Empire; the intertwining of Religion and Science; the history of reading and writing practices; and, the history of Translation.