Dr Xiaona Wang

Selected Publications

Monograph:

• Handling “Occult Qualities” in the Scientific Revolution: Disciplines and New Approaches to Natural Philosophy, from John Dee to Isaac NewtonLink opens in a new window  (Brill, Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science book series, 2023).

Co-ed. Volume:

• Supernovae, Comets and Aristotelian Cosmology: A Collapse of Philosophical Paradigms and the Birth of the New Sciences, 1572–1687, ed. with David McOmish (Turnhout: Brepols, under production)

Research Articles

• “La preuve par la Chine? Jesuit Networks, Academic Politics, and the Shape of the Earth in 1730s Paris”, British Journal for The History of Science, in press, 2026.

• “Challenging Newtonian Chronology: Nicolas Fréret and his Contextualisation of Ancient Chinese Astronomy,” History of European Ideas, in press, 2026.

• “What Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville Knew Without Leaving Paris: Armchair Geography and the Eurasian Makingof a Prolate Earth”, Centaurus, 68.2 (2026), 393–414.

• “An Intellectual Feast: Chinese Learning, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment Eurasianised”, Global Intellectual History 11.6 (2026), part of a special issue on Alexander Statman’s A Global Enlightenment (2023) [review article].

• “By Analogy to the Element of the Stars: The Divine in Jean Fernel’s and William Harvey’s Theories of Generation”, Intellectual History Review 29, no. 3 (2019): 371-87. [Winner of the Charles Schmitt Prize for Intellectual History, 2018]
• “Francis Bacon and Magnetical Cosmology.” Isis 107, no. 4 (2016): 707–21.

Encyclopaedia entry:

• “Condensation and Rarefaction”, in Marco Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017).

Translation:

• Agassiz, The Continuing Revolution: A History of Physics from the Greeks to Einstein (McGraw-Hill, 1968), translated into Chinese, (Xiangtan: Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2015).

Book Review:

• William Poole, John Wilkins (1614-1672): New Essays, (Leiden: Brill, 2017), Annals of Science, Issue 03, (2018): 262-265.

 

Selected Conference and Seminar papers

• August 2023, "The Japanese Maupertuis? French and Chinese Sources for Inō Tadataka's Geodetic Measurement", Consonances I: Mathematics, Language, and the Moral Sense of Nature Conference, Maynooth University, Dublin.
• July 2023, "Evidence Making, Jesuit Missionaries, and the Shape of the Earth in Early Modern China", Leverhulme Global History of Science Workshop, Warwick.
• November 2022, “An English Disciple of Galileo: John Wallis’s Gravitational Theories”, STVDIO Seminar Series, Warwick.
• June 2022, "Upon Closer Inspection: The Comets of 1664 and 1665", Susan Manning workshop, "Supernovae, Comets and Aristotelian Cosmology" (co-organised with Dr David McOmish), Venice.
• September 2020, “Disciples, Disciplines and the Disseminations of Newtonian science in 18th century Scotland”, IASH Work in Progress Talks, IASH, Edinburgh.
• January 2020, “Francis Bacon on attractio and gravitas”, the Society for Renaissance Studies Seminar, The Warburg Institute, London.
• October 2019, “Occult science and Newton’s natural Philosophy”, Intellectual History Research Group Work in Progress Seminar, IASH, Edinburgh.
• September 2019: “From Geometrical Optics to Light Metaphysics: John Dee and his Astrological Physics in Early Modern England”, Thomas Harriot Seminar, Durham University.
• June 2019, “John Dee’s Mathematical Natural Philosophy”, Scientiae annual conference at Queen’s University, Belfast.
• May 2019, “Hooke and Newton on Vibrating Aether”, invited talk in All Souls College, Oxford.

Teaching

Renaissance Europe I: Foundations and Forms, UG module, 2021-22, Convenor (with Dr Claudia Daniotti) and lecturer

Renaissance Europe II: Movement, Revolution and Conflict, UG module, 2021-22, Convenor (with Dr Claudia Daniotti) and lecturer

Methodology/Skills Sessions, PG module, 2021-2022, guest lecturer.