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About Us

The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies, founded in 2006, is an interdisciplinary forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The center promotes the teaching, research and discussion of East Asian subjects, and links the academy to the wider public so that a diverse group of people and scholars can exchange ideas across disciplinary boundaries.

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Fellowships

The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies offers a variety of scholarships and research grants, including post-doctoral fellowships as well as travel and research grants to advanced students and faculty.  

The center's website also publishes other East Asian scholarship from various sources. Please check individual listings for requirements and eligibility.

For opportunities at HUJI- PhD, Post-Doctoral Fellowships and much more see http://international.huji.ac.il

Frieberg Post- Doctoral Fellowships 2025-2026

| Newsletter 2024

Current Fellows

Noa Na

I work on the history of science in Modern China. My research is motivated by the question of how “ordinary people” interact with science – both as an idea and a practice. I focus on science and nationalism, public discourse on science, and the intersections of scientific knowledge and daily life. I am currently revising my dissertation, “Making Science Popular: Readers, Nation, and the Universe in Chinese Popular Science Periodicals, 1933 – 1952” into a book manuscript. Additionally, I am interested in the gendered aspects of scientific labor in the People’s Republic of China, and in contemporary science dissemination on social media platforms.

 

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Dr. Lili Xia is a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches and cultural history. She is now working on her book manuscript titled “Claiming China against the North-South Divide: Classical Poetry and Literati Culture in the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).” By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, the book illustrates the burgeoning literati culture under Jurchen rule, and fleshes out the Jin poetic production in particular, within an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space of Middle Period Sinosphere (800-1400 CE).
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Upcoming Events

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Publications

 

The Red Book: A Guide to Contemporary China

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The Red Book: A Guide to Contemporary China

Edited By Eyal Propper

 

Written in collaboration with the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University and the support of The Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, and the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University, "The Red Book" is a unique Hebrew-language volume combining the knowledge and expertise of Israel's top China specialists. Edited by Amb. Dr. Eyal Propper, this first of its kind compilation provides an extensive overview of the fundamental changes the People's Republic of China has undergone in the past several decades, while further charting potential directions for the country's future development. Consisting of twentyone chapters, the book covers a range of topics related to Chinese history, society, population, economy, politics, security, and foreign policy, with a special focus on Sino-Israeli relations. It includes four chapters by Frieberg Center associates: "The Past as a Mirror for the Future: A Geographical and Historical Perspective" by Gideon Shelach-Lavi; "The Communist Party of China" by Yuri Pines, "Between Law and Politics" by Tamar (Tami) Groswald Ozery, and "China's Education System" by Orna Naftali.

 

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The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared

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The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared

Edited By Yuri Pines, Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpke

 

All major continental empires proclaimed their desire to rule 'the entire world', investing considerable human and material resources in expanding their territory. Each, however, eventually had to stop expansion and come to terms with a shift to defensive strategy. This volume explores the factors that facilitated Eurasian empires' expansion and contraction: from ideology to ecology, economic and military considerations to changing composition of the imperial elites. Built around a common set of questions, a team of leading specialists systematically compare a broad set of Eurasian empires - from Achaemenid Iran, the Romans, Qin and Han China, via the Caliphate, the Byzantines and the Mongols to the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Russians, and Ming and Qing China. The result is a state-of-the art analysis of the major imperial enterprises in Eurasian history from antiquity to the early modern that discerns both commonalities and differences in the empires' spatial trajectories.

 

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몽골제국, 실크로드의 개척자들: 장군, 상인, 지식인

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몽골제국, 실크로드의 개척자들: 장군, 상인, 지식인
(The Mongol Empire and the Pioneers of the Silk Road: Generals, Merchants and Intellectuals)

Edited By Michal Biran, Jonathen Brack and Francesca Fiaschetti

 

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Chinggis Khan and his heirs established the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world, extending from Korea to Hungary and from Iraq, Tibet, and Burma to Siberia. Ruling over roughly two thirds of the Old World, the Mongol Empire enabled people, ideas, and objects to traverse immense geographical and cultural boundaries. Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia reveals the individual stories of three key groups of people—military commanders, merchants, and intellectuals—from across Eurasia. These annotated biographies bring to the fore a compelling picture of the Mongol Empire from a wide range of historical sources in multiple languages, providing important insights into a period unique for its rapid and far-reaching transformations. Read together or separately, they offer the perfect starting point for any discussion of the Mongol Empire’s impact on China, the Muslim world, and the West and illustrate the scale, diversity, and creativity of the crosscultural exchange along the continental and maritime Silk Roads.

 

  • Road-eui gaecheokja deul: janggun, sang’in, jisik'in [The Mongol Empire and the Pioneers of the Silk Road: Generals, merchants and Intellectuals]. Edited by Michal Biran, Jonathen Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti. Tr. Yi Jaehwang. Seoul: Chaekgwa hamggye (Cum Libro), 2021. 519 pp. A Korean Translation of Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti, eds. Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, Intellectuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).
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Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capitol

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Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capitol

By Rotem Geva

 

Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis.

 

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Hebrew Translation of Vol. 2 of Dream of the Red Chamber

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Hebrew Translation of Vol. 2 of Dream of the Red Chamber
(H'alom Ha-Mishkanot Ha'adumin)

Translated to Hebrew from Chinese by Andrew Plaks and Amira Katz

 

Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢Honglou Meng) or The Story of the Stone (石頭記Shitou Ji) is a classic Chinese novel composed by Cao Xueqin, published in 1791. It is a masterpiece of Chinese literature, known for its psychological scope, and its observation of the world view, aesthetics, life-styles, and social relations of 18th- century China. The plot depict the rise and decline of a family much like Cao’s own and, by extension, of the dynasty itself. Although Cao writes about the power of the father over the family, the novel is meant to be a memorial to the women he knew in his
youth: friends, relatives and servants. This is the second volume of the entire comprehensive saga by Cao. The first part was
also published by the Bialik Institute. 

  • Translated to Hebrew from Chinese by Andrew Plaks and Amira Katz. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 2021, 360 pp. ISBN: 978-965-536-349-4

 

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