Florence C. Hsia

I’m a historian of science with interests in the history of astronomy, data and information practices, genres, and print culture. My current research concerns the movement of celestial knowledge, information, and practices within the early modern globe, as well as the history of sinology in early modern Europe.

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago, History, 1999
M.A., University of Chicago, History, 1995
A.B., Princeton University, East Asian Studies, 1990

Books

Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China

Florence C. Hsia. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise. Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.

Selected Publications

• Hsia, Florence. “Writing ‘celestial history’ in early modern Europe.” In Studies in premodern sciences in memory of Noel M. Swerdlow: antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Francesca Rochberg. Cham: Springer, 2025. [https://link.springer.com/book/9783032040398]
• Hsia, Florence. “Out of habit.” In From Rome to Beijing: sacred spaces in dialogue, edited by Daniel Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara. Leiden: Brill, 2024, 216–43. [https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004694927_009]
• Hsia, Florence. “Table talk.” In Premodern experience of the natural world, edited by Maria Avxentevskaya, Katja Krause, Ahmed Ragab, and Dror Weil. New York: Routledge, 2022, 341–61. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003258704]
• Hsia, Florence. “Astronomy after the deluge,” in Science in the archives: pasts, presents, futures, ed. by Lorraine Daston, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 17-52.
• Hsia, Florence. “Chinese astronomy for the Early Modern European reader,” Early science and medicine 13:5 (2008), 417-450.
• Hsia, Florence. “Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata (1667): an apologia pro vita sua” section in Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: the last man who knew everything (Routledge, 2004).

Advisor To

• Jennifer (JJ) Reynolds-Strange
• Aijie Shi

History Courses

• History of Science 201 – The Origins of Scientific Thought – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History of Science 323 – The Scientific Revolution – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History of Science 623 – Studies in Early Modern Science – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History of Science 903 – Seminar: Medieval, Renaissance, and 17th-Century Science – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History of Science 911 – Seminar: Eighteenth-Century Science