04 / Humanities & Writing
Humanities & Writing
Course essays on the history of science, film, and philosophy. These texts are separate from peer-reviewed and technical publications.
04 / Essay Archive
Essay Archive
Four course essays preserved in their original Chinese, with English metadata and abstracts.
History of Science Essay · 2025
On the Shoulders of Giants, or of Caravans?
Global Knowledge Circulation in the Scientific Revolution
Using the Tusi couple as a case study, this essay challenges a Europe-centred story of the Scientific Revolution and traces the material, political, and commercial networks through which astronomical knowledge moved across Eurasia.
Film Studies Essay · 2026
History Revealed in Everyday Life
Long-Take Narration in A City of Sadness
This essay examines how Hou Hsiao-hsien turns historical trauma into everyday experience through long takes, domestic spaces, silence, writing, photography, and off-screen violence in A City of Sadness.
Film Aesthetics Essay · 2024
The Expressive Work of Film Colour
A Study of The Piano in a Factory
Taking The Piano in a Factory as its case, this essay studies colour as film language: its work in rendering character and environment, holding a film’s emotional register, organising narrative movement, and carrying symbolic meaning.
Philosophy Essay · 2025
Creating Dignity Amid Absurdity
Sartre’s Existentialism as a Humanism
A defence of Sartre’s account of freedom, responsibility, and dignity. The essay responds to objections concerning moral nihilism, material constraint, unbearable responsibility, and the need for social recognition.