Nathan Sivin

Professor Nathan Sivin is the Professor Emeritus of Chinese Culture and of the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to this appointment, he was a Professor of Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He came to Penn with appointments in eight departments and programs, teaching until 2006, when he retired. Since then he has worked regularly with individual graduate students on dissertations and occasional undergraduates on honors theses in the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and HSS. His research is mainly on Chinese science and medicine and their interaction with those of Europe, including all fields and periods. It combines the methods of technical, intellectual, cultural, and social history to investigate the articulation of science with other aspects of culture, and the intimate relation of its content to its circumstances. He has taught a range of courses from the Scientific Revolution in Europe to advanced classical Chinese, as well as the sociology of professionalization (with Renée Fox) and ritual in science, technology, and medicine. His main current project is a source book of Chinese health care from antiquity to 1911.