Mapping Chinese Christianity
In early June, Professor Eugenio Menegon (Chinese History), together with co-investigator Prof. Daryl Ireland (Associate Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission & Research Assistant Professor of Mission, BU’s School of Theology) received the exciting news that a Digital Humanities Project they are jointly sponsoring was awarded a seed grant for Summer 2018 by the BU Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Sciences.
Nationalist historiography and post-colonial theory have tended to relegate Christianity to the status of “foreign,” thus rendering it peripheral to the story of China. Yet, as more recent studies have demonstrated, Christianity has undergone a process of localization and “sinicization” since its arrival in China, and its historical experience can actually provide an essential window through which to understand the revolutionary changes of identity, politics, and geography that took place in China during the modern period.
That said, the disparate and constantly evolving nature of Christianity within China has presented key challenges to its study: historical agents were highly mobile, relational networks were constantly in flux, and historical resources remain disparate. Thus, it continues to be difficult to triangulate historical research and accomplish macro-analyses of Christianity in China. So far, no existing effort has taken on the complicated task of organizing and making sense of spatial, temporal, and relational data pertaining to Christianity in China.
This summer research and development grant will focus on the long-term feasibility of the project and prepare it for larger funding opportunities and collaborations with other institutions, producing a proof of concept to be tested for further expansion.