What’s the Problem with Eurocentrism? A conversation between Karine Chemla and Ian Morris, moderated by Reviel Netz

Description: Karine Chemla, a sinologist and historian of global science, and Ian Morris, a classical archeologist and global historian, in a conversation about the basic assumptions of comparative history. What is that that we are trying to gain when we aim to produce comparative and global histories? What is it that we lose when we don’t? It is all too easy to criticize Eurocentrism as a political position, but our task is to describe, precisely, what is historically wrong about it.

Biographies:

Karine Chemla is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), research group SPHERE. Her research focuses, from a historical anthropology viewpoint, on the relationship between mathematics and the various cultures in the context of which it is practiced. Chemla co-edited, with E. Fox Keller, Cultures without culturalism: The making of scientific knowledge (Duke University Press, 2017); and, with A. Keller and C. Proust, Cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world. Numbers, measurements, and operations in documents from Mesopotamia, China and South Asia (Springer, 2022).
 
Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist and holds Stanford's Jean and Rebecca Willard Professorship in Classics. In addition to his Stanford appointment, he is also a Senior Fellow of the IDEAS think tank at the London School of Economics. He has published, most recently, Geography Is Destiny - Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History (2022).
 
Reviel Netz is the Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy at the Department of Classics, Stanford. He is the author, most recently, of Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture (CUP 2020) and of A New History of Greek Mathematics (CUP 2022).