David Mervart
Associate Professor
History
Heidelberg University
Germany
Biography
David Mervart doctoral research dealt with the notion of ‘manners’ (and its Sino-Japanese equivalent of fengsu/fÅ«zoku), in particular its eighteenth-century uses in both Far East and Far West as a term expressive of the difficulties political and moral theory encounters when faced with the experience of the social world rendered fluid by commerce, in what comes to be portrayed as an increasingly unstable history. Currently, he is rewriting this into a publishable form and teach courses on reading primary sources for early modern Japanese history.
Research Interest
My main interest is the history of political discourse in the broad sense, in the period when this includes both the debate over moral foundations of sociability and the questions raised by the rise of commercial society. From this perspective, I have tried to work on the parallel intellectual histories of mainly 18th-century Western Europe and Japan.
