Hyunhee Park: "Illuminating the World before 1492: China, the Islamic World, and the Cross-Cultural Mapping of Asia"

Hyunhee Park (PhD Yale), associate professor of history at the City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, specializes in the history of cross-cultural contacts in East Asia, the Islamic World, the Mongol Empire, and global intellectual history focusing on information/knowledge transfers including geographical knowledge, foodways, and distillation. 

Her book Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2012) explores medieval contact and exchange between the Islamic World and China by utilizing geographic and cartographic information. Her new research projects encompass world mapping and other types of information transfers spanning medieval Afro-Eurasia and the early modern Atlantic World.