Sander Molenaar
Post-doc researcher
- E-mail: sander.molenaar@iisg.nl
- Department: Research
Sander Molenaar is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China’, which is part of a large-scale collaborative project on the social and regional histories of material infrastructures (roads, bridges, city walls (1000-1800) under the supervision of prof. Hilde De Weerdt.
He studied Languages and Cultures of China, as well as European Expansion and Globalization History, at Leiden University, where he wrote a thesis on the collective memory of Ming eunuch Zheng He (1371-1435). His subsequent PhD research at Warwick University was concerned with the impact of coastal violence on state-society relations during the mid-Ming period (ca. 1450-1600).
Sander is interested in the digital exploration of local gazetteers from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, especially in relation to the impact of the maritime world on coastal societies.
Publications: Sander Molenaar – Research output — Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)
Key publications
Peer-reviewed journal articles
“Locating the Sea: A visual and social analysis of coastal gazetteers in late imperial China,” Journal of European Association for Chinese Studies (forthcoming).
“Turning Bandits into 'Good Citizens': Coastal violence on the south coast of the Ming Empire in the fifteenth century,” International Journal of Maritime History Vol. 32.3 (2020): 681-696.
Other academic publications
“The Sea in Five Images: A preliminary exploration of visual representations of the sea in late imperial Chinese local gazetteers,” Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Preprint Series (under review).
“Nomads of the Sea: How the Mongols learned to sail,” in Rens Krijgsman, ed., Rombouts Graduate Conference Proceedings (Leiden: Stichting Shilin, 2012), 55-69.
“The Sea as a Highway,” in Yedda Palemeq Wang and Daan Elders, eds, Exploiting the Waters: Essays from the Crayenborgh Honors Class 2010 (Leiden, 2010),
