Nicola Di Cosmo

Nicola Di Cosmo is Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. A scholar of China and inner Asia from prehistory to the present, he most...

Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, has co-edited Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which offers an integrated picture of Rome...

As part of Ideas: Celebrating 2017–18, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor, Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, Johan Heilbron, Louise and John Steffens...

On April 26, 2018, the Institute community gathered to celebrate Ideas 2017–18 with talks by IAS Members––deep ideas explained in under 20 minutes with no slides or chalk––followed by audience discussions moderated by Faculty. The program concluded...

Half a century ago a French historian of rural Languedoc published a history of climate and people: climate changes, is subject to fluctuations, and (since history is about change) climate is the object of history.2 Le Roy Ladurie’s implied (if...

How can historians contribute to investigating the ­relationships between climate change, ecology, and human activity? Scientific research is making available ­volumes of data on the possible correlations between ­environmental change and social...

In his recent book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catas­trophe in the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker states: “although climate change can and does produce human catastrophe, few historians include the weather in their analyses.” This is...

Historians today can hardly answer the question: when does history begin? Traditional boundaries between history, protohistory, and prehistory have been blurred if not completely erased by the rise of concepts such as “Big History” and “macrohistory...

Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies, School of Historical Studies. This lecture will provide an overview of the production and characteristics of alien history in early China, while acknowledging and attempting to gauge...

In March, Professor Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, brought together twelve international scholars who participated in a workshop that explored “The Sense of the Past among Inner...