Lu Zhao

Lu Zhao (趙璐)
Associate Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU
Email
lz69@nyu.edu
Room
N862

Zhao Lu is an Associate Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Chinese intellectual and cultural history. Before joining NYU Shanghai, he was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2017–2018) and a research fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2013–2017).

As an intellectual and cultural historian, Zhao Lu studies innovation in the face of adversity, the ideas that people came up with when things did not go to plan. His 2024 book, Weird Confucius: Unorthodox Representations of Confucius in History, forgoes analysis of Confucius the historical figure in favor of illuminating bizarre, sometimes wondrous, fictional representations of Confucius used to make sense of human anxieties: from ancient prophet to the shrewd villain of 19th-century American newspapers and a cute, your-friendly-neighborhood Confucius in the 21st century. He also published with Kathlene Baldanza Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam. The book is a translation and detailed study of the Qing dynasty scholar Cai Tinglan’s (1801–1859) shipwreck in Vietnam and his travel back to China. Zhao Lu’s 2019 book, In Pursuit of the Great Peace: Han Dynasty Classicism and the Making of Early Medieval Literati Culture, demonstrates how the study of the Confucian classics in the Han dynasty (205 BCE–220 CE) perpetuated a culture of travel among the literati and reshaped the intellectual landscape of 2nd-century CE China.

Collaborating with IKGF and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Zhao Lu also studies the history of divination as technical knowledge. He has co-authored with Brandon Dotson and Constance A. Cook Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination in Transcultural Context, and with Constance A. Cook Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching. He also works with Michael Lackner as a general editor of the IKGF Handbook Series of Prognostication and Predication in China with Brill Press. 

Currently, Zhao Lu is working on a book project on the intellectual and cultural history of anxiety in early and medieval China. The project will examine not only how anxiety played a crucial role in problem-solving and decision making in politics, but it will also explore how the emotion constituted a large part of people’s daily life, both in a constructive and a disruptive way. By focusing on anxiety, this project will challenge the rationality-centered assumption in the field of intellectual history and more importantly demonstrates how emotions, especially anxiety, are in fact an integral part of intellectual innovations.

 

Select Publications

  • Weird Confucius: Unorthodox Representations of Confucius in History. London: Bloomsbury, 2024
  • “Should I Be Worried? Worry in Dunhuang Divination.” International Journal of Divination and Prognostication 5.2 (2024): 209-239
  • Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam. With Kathlene Baldanza. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023
  • Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination in Transcultural Context. With Constance Cook and Brandon Dotson. Leiden: Brill, 2021  
  • In Pursuit of the Great Peace: Han Dynasty Classicism and the Making of Early Medieval Literati Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019
  • Xinling xue jiaozhu 心靈學校注 (Mental Philosophy with annotations and collations). Guangzhou: Nanfang ribao press, 2018
  • Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching. With Constance A. Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017

 

Education

  • PhD, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
    University of Pennsylvania
  • MA, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
    University of Pennsylvania
  • BA, Comparative Literature
    Capital Normal University
Research Interests
  • History of Emotions
  • Chinese Intellectual History
  • Education and Travel
  • History of Divination
  • History of Science
Courses Taught
  • Global Perspective on Societies (GPS)
  • Dunhuang and its Global Connections
  • Eat, Pray, Ponder: Chinese Intellectual Culture through the Ages
  • Foreign Societies in Classical Chinese Writing
  • The History of the Silk Road