Roel Sterckx FBA (born 1969) is a Flemish-British sinologist and anthropologist. He is the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Clare College.

Life and career

Sterckx attended secondary school at the Sint-Jan Berchmanscollege in Mol, Belgium, and read sinology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1991). He went on to study Chinese philosophy at National Taiwan University before moving to Cambridge ( Clare Hall), where he obtained a Ph.D. in Oriental studies (1997). He was a research fellow at Oxford (Wolfson College) and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona before returning to Cambridge in 2002. He served as Secretary-General of the European Association for Chinese Studies from 2006 to 2012. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Selected works

• The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.
• Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
• De l'Esprit aux Esprits: Enquête sur la notion de shen en Chine (with Romain Graziani). Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007.
• In the Fields of Shennong. Cambridge: Needham Research Institute, 2008.
• Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (2015)
• 胡司德, 古代中国的动物与灵异. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2016.
• 胡司德, 早期中国的食物、祭祀和圣贤. Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2018.
• Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest times to 1911 (with Dagmar Schaefer and Martina Siebert). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
• Chinese Thought. From Confucius to Cook Ding. London: Penguin, 2019. (Highly commended; Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2020).
• Ways of Heaven. An Introduction to Chinese Thought. New York, Basic Books, 2019.
• Chinees Denken. Over Geschiedenis, filosofie, en samenleving. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds, 2021)
• 中国思想. 从孔夫子到庖丁. 上海: 文艺出版社, 2022.
• Китайская мысль: от Конфуция до повара Дина. Moscow: Alpina, 2022.

External links

• Homepage at Cambridge University
• Inaugural Lecture
• Profile British Academy