Sander Molenaar

Sander Molenaar is a postdoctoral researcher on the project ‘The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China’. 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).

His key publications include “Locating the Sea: A visual and social analysis of coastal gazetteers in late imperial China,” Journal of European Association for Chinese Studies (forthcoming), and “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 include: “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; and “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),

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. His research interests also include late imperial Chinese history, social history of public infrastructure, and blue humanities and coastal studies.