About the Speaker

Michael Keevak is a historian with research interests in Europe and East Asia 1500-1900, Renaissance and Baroque Studies, and Comparative Literature. Trained at the Universities of Columbia and Yale, he has held visiting positions at the University of Amsterdam, University of Hamburg, Princeton University, and Pennsylvania State University. He is currently Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University, where he has taught since 1993.

Keevak has published several books, including Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (Hong Kong University Press, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Wayne State University Press, 2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (Wayne State University Press, 2001). He is currently working on his next book Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).

Keevak received the Academia Sinica Book Award and NTU Distinguished Book Award for Becoming Yellow. He won the NTU Outstanding Book Award for both The Story of a Stele and The Pretended Asian.