Roel Sterckx


Roel Sterckx FBA 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 grew up in Retie, Belgium, and attended secondary school at the Sint-Jan Berchmanscollege in Mol. He read sinology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He went on to study Chinese philosophy at National Taiwan University before moving to Cambridge, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Oriental studies. He was a research fellow at Oxford and taught 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, and has been a long-serving trustee of the Needham Research Institute. 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. 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
  • 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.Chinese Thought. From Confucius to Cook Ding. London: Penguin, 2019..Ways of Heaven. An Introduction to Chinese Thought. New York, Basic Books, 2019.Chinees Denken. Over Geschiedenis, filosofie, en samenleving.
  • 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.