BY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ANDREW HUI

We live in a technologically driven world obsessed with breakthroughs, innovations, and metrics. Information is abundant, yet meaning is scarce; data is everywhere, but wisdom is harder to find. The humanities exist to bridge that gap. My work — and that of my colleagues — is dedicated to rethinking about the past because it continues to shape the present and how we imagine the future. Without scholars keeping these intellectual traditions alive, society would be impoverished.

My own research follows the movement of ideas across civilisations — from Renaissance libraries, which forged new forms of the inner life of the mind, to the Jesuits in China, whose scientific and philosophical exchange helped create the first global modern knowledge systems.

I recently completed The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton University Press, 2025),  which is a study of the study: the personal workspace where we think, read, and write. I begin from a simple but far-reaching intuition: our inner lives are universally shaped by our interior spaces. The Renaissance was the moment when a new kind of intellectual chamber – the ‘studiolo – crystallised into cultural form. Conceptually, the studiolo functions as a pharmakon: both remedy and poison, sanctuary and snare. At its highest aspiration, it was imagined as a place for ethical self-cultivation — a room for the soul. In the iconography of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, bookishness was elevated into a saintly virtue: the Virgin Mary receives the Annunciation while reading, and St. Jerome, depicted in his study surrounded by manuscripts, becomes the patron of contemplative scholarship.

The Study was born in Singapore and very much a pandemic project. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, our studies became cloisters, classrooms, and sometimes prisons. We were forced to confront the strange ambiguity of interiority — its consolations and its claustrophobia. But every sanctuary shadows forth its own temptation. When one spends too much time inside the mind’s chamber, bibliophilia can sour into bibliomania. The Renaissance already sensed this danger: Prospero retreats into his library to such a degree that he forfeits his dukedom; Don Quixote mistakes his books for reality; Dr. Faustus barters his soul in pursuit of forbidden knowledge. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, the dream of the Renaissance library helped produce the modern psyche — brilliant, restless, and perpetually overfilled with information.

Methodologically, my book does not treat history as mere “context” and literature as “text,” nor literature as an ornament affixed to society. Rather, I treat literature, history, and art as co-produced in a shared atmosphere of cultural imagination. Archives and inventories tell us how people loved books; fiction tells us how people feared them, were deformed by them, or lost themselves within them. The physical record alone yields only half the story; the fictive record reveals the psychic cost.

The European studiolo has cousins elsewhere — in China, for instance, where the Ming scholar Wen Zhengming painted his Garden of the Inept Administrator as an inward landscape of cultivated retreat. Placing his pavilion alongside Montaigne’s tower does not homogenise either culture; it reveals an affinity neither could fully perceive in isolation. As the German polymath philosopher and notable sinophile Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had hoped, such juxtapositions produce “a commerce of doctrine and mutual light.” In this comparative frame, the study is no longer a European enclosure but a global laboratory of the mind.

This book is also a disciplinary self-reflection. Scholars have long studied how others have read — especially people of the past — but seldom investigate their own habits of reading in the present. Yet what we read, and how we read, shapes our mental life at least as much as the objects of our research. Bibliography and autobiography turn out to be continuous. The history of reading is also a philosophy of attention. To study the study, then, is to be engaged with an anthropology of the self. We inherit its blessings and its dangers every time we close the door behind us.

My next venture extends my attempts at globalising the Renaissance by turning to this hemisphere. I am working on a book called The Emperor’s Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global World (Penguin, under contract). In 1747, the Chinese emperor commissioned something unusual in his Summer Palace: a European labyrinth. Elegant, elusive, and disorienting, it was a perfect symbol for the interactions between China and the West. And, like so many grand designs of empire, it ended in ruins: when British and French troops sacked the palace in 1860, the maze went up in a blaze.

Spanning the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, this book is about the men who built the maze — the European Jesuits. They came with a singular mission: to win China for Christ by converting its ruler, the Son of Heaven. But conversion was a tricky business, so the Jesuits brought not just faith but also reason: Aristotle and mechanical clocks, astronomical treatises and the art of linear perspective. In turn, they translated Confucius into Latin and brought Chinese garden designs to the country houses of Europe.

What is remarkable is that the first true meeting between these two civilisations — each ancient, each with its own intricate cosmologies and quirks — occurred mostly through this tiny pipeline of learned men. The Emperor’s Maze traces the Jesuits’ precarious journey through palaces and workshops, triumphs and betrayal. Its bold claim: by bringing secular knowledge to China — philosophy, technology, art – the Jesuits plunged into the saeculum — only to find that they had ultimately secularised themselves. They became worldly, and in doing so, helped give birth — unwittingly — to a world that was modern, secular, and global.

The Emperor’s Maze is a book about the East and West connections, misfires, and the strange beauty of getting lost together. I hope to follow in the footsteps Peter Frankopan, William Dalrymple, and Stephen Greenblatt, scholars who write for a broader audience by illuminating the movement of ideas across cultures. In a world still shaped by misunderstanding, this book reveals how the early global age was forged — and how, even in failure, its lessons continue to resonate.