I graduated in 1999 in Chinese Language and Literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice where I then obtained, in 2006, a PhD in co-tutorship with INALCO of Paris. I subsequently carried out postdoctoral research (2007-2009), funded by the Chiang-Ching-guo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange of Taiwan, at KULeuven in Belgium. I was an associate professor of Chinese Language and Literature, responsible for the teaching of the Chinese language at the University, and Director of the Language Center of the University of Sassari. I was a professor of Chinese Philology at the University of Naples L’Orientale, a position I left after emigrating to Israel.
I am co-founder of the “Han Studies Group” at the Frieberg Center for Asian Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I am currently a senior research associate at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of the Ruhr University of Bochum, a member of the Frieberg Center for Asian Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher at INSS in Tel Aviv.
I am interested in the political and economic thought of imperial China, classical aesthetic thought, and translation from classical Chinese.
Among my full translations: Xin yu 新語 by Lu Jia (Nuovi argomenti: Un trattato politico della Cina antica, Venezia, Cafoscarina, 2012 and Lu Jia’s New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han Dynasty, Leiden, Brill, 2020, with Paul R. Goldin). Currently, I am working on the translation of He Guanzi, with Paul R. Goldin.
To contact me: elisa.levi.sabattini [at] gmail.com