Chun Xu is a research fellow and the corresponding PI for the Volkswagen Foundation project Towards a Chinese History of Data, hosted at the Chair for Sinology with a Focus on the Intellectual and Cultural History of China. His research interests revolve around the technological history of statecraft in dynastic China. He currently focuses on how the skilled and material practices of making, managing, and using data—whether in household registration, fiscal administration, or land recording—shaped successive rationalities of rule and structured the possibilities and limits of statecraft across the longue durée of Chinese history.
Chun Xu received his doctorate from Heidelberg University in 2018. He was a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 2018 to 2024, where he led the working group Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700). Before joining the FAU in 2026, he was a Jing Brand Fellow at the Needham Research Institute. Xu has taught courses on water history at the University of Chicago and TU Berlin; and on the global history of data at Bard College Berlin and Witten/Herdecke.