People
The ISCSD team
The Society Board
President
Michael Lackner serves as Senior Professor of Sinology in the Department of Near Eastern and East Asian Languages and Cultures, and, until 2023 as the Director of the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. At present, he is the spokesperson (Sprecher) of the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS-E) “Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices in a Global Perspective” (see also https://www.phil.fau.de/person/michael-lackner/).
After studying in Heidelberg and Munich, he graduated with a master’s degree focused on the topic “Prophetic Songs of the Chin Dynasty” (1979). He completed both doctorate studies and habilitation in Munich, regarding the topics “The Chinese forest of Dreams. The Ming Dream Encyclopedia Meng-lin hsüan-chieh” (1983) and “Western Humanism in Jesuit Teachings in China” (1990) respectively.
His research interests include numerous topics, such as the intellectual history of China, especially Confucianism (11th to 14th century), China’s history of science since the 19th century, discourses on identity from the 9th century until the present as well as divination and prophecy in traditional China. At present, he is particularly interested in the assessment of mantic practices by members of the learned élite, i. e. the relationship between scholars and practitioners; furthermore, in the advice provided to rulers for decision-making through different forms of divination.
His publications include, among many others:
Xiaodao keguan 小道可觀> [The minor ways deserve attention] (Beijing/Hongkong: Sanlian, 2018); “Zukunftsschau und Zeichen”, in Verwandlungen: Vom Über-Setzen religiöser Signifikanten der Moderne, ed. Stefanie Burkhardt et. al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2018), 18-21; “Some Preliminary Remarks on the First Chinese Translation of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Summa theological’”, in Geschichte der Germanistik. Historische Zeitschrift für die Philologien, 53/54 2018, 21-33; Coping with the Future. Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia (ed.) (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Polyphony Embodied. Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writhings (ed., with Nikola Chardonnens) (Berlin/Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2014);
Contact form:
Vice President
Marta Hanson is a retired Associate Professor of the history of East Asian medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021). Before that she taught late imperial Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego (1997-2004). Currently, she is an affiliate of Department III “Artifacts, Action, Knowledge” at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science with the thesis “Inventing a Tradition in Chinese Medicine: From Universal Canon to Local Medical Knowledge in South China, the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century.” Since then she has published broadly on the history of medicine in China, public health in East Asia, and connected Sino-European medical history. Her first monograph is titled Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011.
She is currently writing a book titled “‘Grasping Heaven and Earth’ (Qian Kun zaiwo 乾坤在握): The Mind in Hand in Chinese Medicine” that examines connections between divination and medicine in imperial Chinese history through how healers as well as diviners used their hands to help think through things, calculate, divine, and prognosticate.
Related to contemporary issues, she has written about Chinese medical responses to SARS and what COVID19 has revealed about US-China differences and patterns of responses to pandemics. Within cross-cultural medical history, she has an on-going scholarly collaboration with Gianna Pomata (early modern European historian) on 17th- to 18th-century translations of Chinese medical texts into European languages. This has resulted in several publications related to the Specimen Medicinæ Sinicæ(1682), the first translation into Latin of Chinese medical texts.
She was senior co-editor of the journal Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (2011-2016), President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (ISHEASTM, 2015-2019), and is currently on the editorial boards of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society, Asian Medicine, Chinese Medicine and Culture, and the Asian Journal of Medical Humanities. As an independent scholar she continues to enjoy working with graduate students and post-doctorates, exchanging drafts of writing with colleagues, and publishing about her current research focus on “knowing hands” in the history of Chinese medicine and divination.
Contact form:
Secretary
Stéphanie Homola is Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and member of the French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE). Before joining CNRS, she has worked at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) as Junior Professor of Ethnology (2017-2022), and Director (2018-2022) of the Elite Master Program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures” (SDAC). She has been a Visiting Scholar at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication” (IKGF), at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), and Research Fellow at College de France. Trained in Social Anthropology at EHESS (PhD) and in Chinese studies at INALCO, Paris, she has written extensively on divinatory practices in contemporary Chinese societies. She is the author of The Art of Fate Calculation. Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng (Berghahn, 2023). Her current research focuses on bodily memory practices as technologies of knowledge that point at broader patterns of knowledge assimilation, application, and transmission in Chinese societies.
Contact form:
Treasurer
Stephan Heilen, born 1965, is Professor of Classics with emphasis on Latin and Neo-Latin literature at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. After studying Latin, Greek, Italian, papyrology and codicology in Münster and Florence, he received his PhD at Münster (1998) with the first critical edition of two Neo-Latin didactic poems inspired by Lucretius and Manilius, the De rebus naturalibus et divinis by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Bonincontri (publ. Leipzig 1999). His habilitation (Münster 2006) was an edition with translation and extensive commentary of the fragments of the Greek astrological manual of Antigonus of Nicaea (2nd c. CE; publ. in 2 vols., Berlin 2015). After an assistant-professorship in Münster (1999–2005) and a tenure-track in Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006–2009, with promotion to associate professor) he followed a call to his current position in Osnabrück. His main research interest is the history of astrology in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the Renaissance, on which he published profusely, with a double focus, i.e., philological (textual criticism and editorial problems) and technical (analysis of astronomical and mathematical detail as well as technical terminology). Further research interests are Neo-Latin (especially didactic) poetry, forgeries of texts and artefacts, and the history of classical scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recent books are his Konjunktionsprognostik in der Frühen Neuzeit, Band 1: Die Antichrist-Prognose des Johannes von Lübeck (1474) zur Saturn-Jupiter-Konjunktion von 1504 und ihre frühneuzeitliche Rezeption, Baden – Baden: Koerner 2020, and Hartmann Schedel and his astral texts: exploring a neglected treasure-trove and its owner’s mind, Baden-Baden (forthcoming). Together with Michael Lackner and Matthias Heiduk, he is editing a volume Horoscopy across Civilizations: Comparative Approaches to Western, Indian, and Chinese Astrology and Chronomancy (to be published soon, rooted in his one-year fellowship at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, IKGF, at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2015/16). Together with Claudio de Stefani, he is preparing a large anthology of ancient Greek astrological poetry (under contract with OUP for the series Oxford Classical Texts).
Contact form:
The Society Team
Online Editor, Book Series Coordinator, Book Talk Manager
Gang Li holds a double PhD in Religious Studies and Islamic Religious Studies from the University of Groningen and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. His research interests include Islam and Muslim communities within the broader context of Chinese history. In his recent work, he tries to illuminate the esoteric dimensions of the Han Kitab’s divinatory philosophies and the spiritual practices of various Sufi orders in China. From 2020 to 2023, Gang Li was a Research Fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate, Freedom, and Prognostication” (IKGF). At FAU, he is also affiliated with the FAU Research Center for Islam and Law in Europe (FAU EZIRE). At the ISCSD, Gang Li serves as online editor and also coordinates the book series “Prognostication in History,” besides being in charge of the ISCSD Book Talks.
Contact form:
IJDP Managing Editor, ISCSD Coordinator, Online Editor
Ulrike Pickardt holds an MA in Japanese studies and English literature and has a background in IT/web design and usability engineering (more details at xing.de). She greatly enjoys applying her many years of experience in text work, copy-editing, proof-reading, translation, research, and desktop as well as online publishing for the International Society for the Critical Study of Divination, where she serves as Managing Editor of the International Journal of Divination and Prognostication, society coordinator/administrator, and coordinator/editor of the ISCSD website.
