Biographical Note
Dr. Morar received his PhD from Harvard University in 2019. Dr. Morar has broad linguistic training with working knowledge and philological competence in a number of European and East Asian Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Manchu, and Chinese. He uses these linguistics abilities to research the relations and cross-cultural exchanges between China and the West in the past and the present. Dr. Morar has published on the history of translation of scientific and technological knowledge. Currently, he is finishing a monograph on the translation of cartographic knowledge between China and the West in the age of first contacts. Dr. Morar is also active in the areas of Digital Humanities and Computer Aided Translation.
Research InterestS
- History of Translation
- History of Science
- Science in Translation
- Digital Humanities
- Computer Aided Translation and Machine Learning
Book Chapters and Book Reviews
- “Science in China: Key Problems, Topics and Methodologies” in: Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies, Routledge 2021
- “Historicism” in: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley and Blackwell, 2018
- “Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius,” “Semitecolo’s telescope,” “The Pantograph” and “Machina Coelestis” in: Paper worlds, Printing knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Harvard Collection of Scientific Instruments, 2010
- “The Nature of Natural Classification: Review of Federico Marcon, Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, University of Chicago Press, 2019” in Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 34, 3 (November 2019).
- “Review of Dominic Sachsenmeier, The Global Entanglements of a Man who never Travelled, Columbia University Press, 2018” in Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6 (2019), 510-12.
Journal Articles
- “First Encounters: Early European Attempts to Translate the Chinese language in the 16th Century,” in Translation and Interpreting Studies (forthcoming 2022)
- “Relocating the Qing in the Global History of Science: The Manchu Translation of the 1603 World Map of Matteo Ricci and Li Yingshi,”, in Isis: Journal of the History of Science, 109:4, 2018, 679-694.
- “China’s Great West: Matteo Ricci’s World Map and the Quandaries of European Identity in the Late Ming Dynasty,” in Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6 (2019), 14-30.
- “Reinventing Machines: The Transmission History of the Leibniz Calculator,” The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 48, 1, 2015 (doi:10.1017/ S0007087414000429).
Conference Presentations
- At the limits of China: frontiers, borders, and political geography in early modern Sino-Western cartographic exchanges, Cambridge University, Cambridge Seminars in the History of Cartography, November 16 2021
- Morar F-S. (2021). Harvard University, Cartographies, Real and Imagined: Polo, Rici, Calvino, 13 Apr 2021, (Presented).
- Morar F-S. (2020).The 1555 Map of Advantageous Terrain Past and Present Gu jin xing sheng zhi tu 古 今形勝之圖 and the Jesuit Maps of China in Comparative Perspective. Conference Displacing Worldviews: Maps and Mapping between Western Europe and East Asia, August 29, 2020, Macao S.A.R. China.
- Morar F-S. (2020). A Jesuit World Map? A Forgery? Making Sense of a Newly Discovered World Map (Kunyutu 坤輿圖) From Switzerland Morar, F., Aug 2020. AAS in Asia
- Morar F-S. (2021). “Cartography and the Global Renaissance,” Guest Lecture, Yale-National University of Singapore, April 9, 2021
- Morar F-S. (2021) “What kind of history of science?”, Invited talk, University of Macao, November 13, 2020