Mr. Ling-Wei Kung received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. His research interests include the relations between early modern China and Eurasia, the history of technology, and Inner Asian philology. He has held visiting fellowships at Kyoto University and Kyushu University in Japan. His doctoral dissertation investigates how the information networks between China proper, Tibet, Mongolia, and Xinjiang facilitated the Qing dynasty’s geographic understandings of Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, Safavid Iran, and Durrani Afghanistan. In so doing, his research sheds light on information circulation, international trade, and knowledge transmission.

While continuously using multilingual historical sources to study late imperial China and Eurasia, Dr. Kung also expects to gradually expand his research scope to the history of the Mongol empire, especially by focusing on the interactions of medicine, technology, and material cultures between different civilizations in Eurasia after the thirteenth century. Accordingly, he looks forward to studying Chinese history on Eurasian and global scales.

Dr. Kung has worked as an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology since August 2021.