I read sinology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) where I also did my teacher training in history (PGCE/Agrégation). I then did further studies in classical Chinese and philosophy at National Taiwan University, and came to Cambridge for my PhD (1997) at this faculty, then known as Faculty of Oriental Studies. After a research fellowship at Wolfson College Oxford and a stint at the University of Arizona, I returned to Cambridge in 2002. I was appointed to the Chair of Chinese in 2007 (my inaugural lecture can be found here). I have served as Faculty (co)-chair and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies (2007-10; 2014-17), am a trustee of the Needham Research Institute, and a Fellow of Clare College. In 2013 I was elected Fellow of the British Academy. In Chinese publications I am known as Hu Side 胡司德.
I welcome proposals from prospective graduate students interested in pre-imperial and early imperial China. Dissertation topics I have supervised in recent years include rhetoric and persuasion during the Chunqiu period, technical studies of texts such as the Rites of Zhou, Huainanzi, Yantielun and the Confucian Analects, early Chinese economic thought, the Han apocrypha, Han perceptions of the south, and the role of music and ritual in early Chinese thought.
Classical and Literary Chinese, pre-modern Chinese history, Chinese thought
Chinese thought; pre-imperial and early imperial cultural history; natural history; classical Chinese language.
Prof. Sterckx will be on research leave during the academic year 2024-25 and is unable to take new students or host visiting scholars during that period.
Chinese thought and cultural history with a focus on the pre-imperial and early imperial period; classical and literary Chinese language and philology. My work is inspired to some degree by questions raised in the history of science and anthropology. I have an ongoing interest in forms of knowledge about the natural world in pre-modern China (cultural ecology, agriculture, natural history, animal studies). I have also written on food and dietary culture, ritual and religion, and economic thought. I am interested in the interplay between moral and material values in Chinese thought and how this played out in Warring States and Han society (the economics of ritual, gift culture, perceptions of wealth and poverty, the role of labour and the professions, innovation).
Current PhD students
| John Donegan-Cross: A Study of the Literary and Material Culture of Early China through the lens of the fenghuang 鳳凰 |
| Ashton Ng: Han Fei's Ideal Polity |
| Peichao Qin: Pyromancy and Epigraphy in Late Shang China: A Study of the Hopkins Collection of Oracle Bones in Cambridge University Library |
