check
Staff | Department of Asian Studies

Staff

Yuri

Prof. Yuri Pines

Head of Department of Asian Studies
Traditional and modern Chinese history, early Chinese thought, China's political culture

Prof. Yuri Pines 尤銳 is Michael W. Lipson Professor of Asian Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Guest Professor at Nankai University, Tianjin, China, and visiting professor at Beijing Normal University, China.

Read More
His studies focus on early Chinese political thought, traditional Chinese political culture, origins of Chinese historiography, and sociopolitical history of pre-imperial China, particularly the state and empire of Qin. His major publications include The Everlasting Empire: Traditional Chinese Political Culture and Its Enduring Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2012); Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (University of Hawaii Press, 2009); Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. (University of Hawaii Press, 2002). He co-authored (with Gideon Shelach and Yitzhak Shichor) 3-volumes All- under-Heaven: Imperial China (in Hebrew, Open University Press, 2011, 2013, forthcoming); co-edited together with Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach and Robin D.S. Yates the Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin revisited (University of California Press, 2014), and co-edited with Paul R. Goldin and Martin Kern the Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China (Brill, forthcoming 2015). In addition, he has several other edited and co-edited publications, and over 90 articles in scholarly journals and collected volumes.

Read Less
Avital

Dr. Avital Rom

Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow
Chinese Studies

Dr Rom is a Louis Frieberg Postdoctoral Fellow during the autumn-winter semester of the academic year 2021-22. She earned her BA in East Asian Studies (2013) from Tel-Aviv University; and her MPhil (2015) and PhD (2020) in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge. 

Read More

Her research focuses on the social and political aspects of hearing, sound, and silence in early China (particularly the Warring States and Western Han periods). Her doctoral dissertation, titled Polyphonic Thinking: Music and Authority in Early China, examined the rhetorical and political functions of music in the Warring States (453-221 BCE) and Western Han (206 BCE – 9 CE) periods. Currently, she researches the social history of deafness in early China, and editing a volume on the history of disability in ancient China, titled Other Bodies: Disability and Bodily Impairment in Early China. She is also finalising the manuscript of a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation. 

 

Dr Rom has been teaching Classical Chinese at the University of Cambridge since 2016. This semester, she will be teaching an MA course titled ‘Music and Political Authority in Chinese History – From the Warring States to Early Medieval Times.’ Her publications include the articles ‘Echoing Rulership: Understanding Musical References in the Huainanzi’ (Early China, 2017) and ‘Beat the Drums or Break Them: Bells and Drums as Communication Devices in Early Chinese Warfare’ (Journal of Chinese Military History, 2020). 

Read Less
GS

Prof. Gideon Shelach

Head of China Sector

Prof. Gideon Shelach is the Louis Freiberg Professor of East Asian Studies and the Chair of the Institute of African and Asian Studies, the Hebrew University.

Read More
He hold a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Pittsburgh and since 1995 he is conducting archaeological field works in Northeast China. Currently he is heading the Fuxin Regional Archaeological Project in Liaoning province. Gideon published 8 books and more than 60 papers in leading academic journals (including Science, Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,Journal of Archaeological Science, and more, including academic journals in China). Among his recent books are: The Archaeology of China: From Prehistory to the Han Dynasty (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Prehistoric Societies on the Northern Frontiers of China: Archaeological Perspectives on Identity Formation and Economic Change during the First Millennium BCE (Equinox, 2009); Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Project (co-author, Pittsburgh 2011), The Birth of Empire: The State of Qin revisited (co-editor, University of California Press 2013).

Read Less
Dan Sherer

Dr. Dan Sherer

Japan Studies

Dan Sherer is a historian of Pre-Modern Japan, with a focus on the Sengoku period (roughly the 15th and 16th century). His research interests are primarily how smaller political entities of the time functioned and how they interacted with the powerful warrior regimes that ruled and fought over Japan at the time. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Dr. Sherer has been a researcher at the Tokyo University Historiographical Institute and a visiting fellow at the Kyoto Institute, Library and Archives (KILA).

Read More

Dr. Sherer current project focuses on how the Kyoto temples of the Nichiren Buddhist sect survived the turbulent 16th century. This project utilizes the documents left behind by the Council of Head Temples, a governing body that allowed them to negotiate with the imperial court and powerful warriors as a unit, rather than temple by temple. This Council allowed them to see their way through one of the most violent periods in Japan’s history without taking up the sword themselves. Dr. Sherer has also published works on banditry and the history of Japanese conjuring.
Read Less