Emily Teo

Emily Teo is a historian of Sino-European cultural interconnections. Her research interests are in travel accounts, material culture and histories of museums. She takes a source-driven approach to historical research, allowing new perspectives to emerge from the close study of texts and objects. At KU Leuven, she investigates how Chinese material infrastructures were recorded in early modern European travel accounts and late imperial Chinese youji. Previously, she completed an Erasmus Mundus joint doctorate in "Text and Event in Early Modern Europe" at the University of Kent and the Freie Universitaet Berlin in 2019, with the dissertation "A Comparative History of Travel: Late-Ming and Early Modern Travel Writers in China". Following this, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Erfurt on the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded project "Strategies of Collecting and Displaying China in Nineteenth Century Germany: Gotha's Chinese Cabinet". The project investigated the history and development of the largest collection of Chinese artefacts in continental Europe during the early nineteenth century. Her research has been published in Past and Present and in edited volumes.