Dagmar Schäfer (Germany) is Co-Director of The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding and Director of the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Dagmar Schäfer
Dagmar Schäfer (Germany) is Director of the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as Honorary Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Northwest University, Xi’an. Before taking up her current positions, she was Chair of China Studies and History of Technology at the University of Manchester (2011–2015).
A sinologist and historian of technology and science, she has published widely on the premodern history of China (Song-Ming), materiality, and the processes and structures that lead to varying knowledge systems. In 2020, Schäfer was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG (German Research Foundation) for her development of new approaches to cultural studies and the resulting comparative perspectives on a comprehensive global history.
Her monograph, The Crafting of 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), received the Pfizer Awards and Joseph Levenson Book prize. Recent publications include Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023), coedited with Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning and the working group volume Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues (Brill, 2023), coedited with Glenn W. Most and Mårten Söderblom Saarela. A forthcoming monograph co-authored with Giorgio Riello focusing on an asynchronous comparison of silk in Renaissance Italy and Yuan China is expected to appear this year with Princeton University Press.
