• Region: China; Eurasia; Europe
• Time: 17th century
• Theme: Cultural History; Intellectual History

Yuval Givon is a historian of the early modern period, specializing in the communication between Western Europe and China during the seventeenth century, particularly through Jesuit missionary networks. His research offers a new vision of early globalization by focusing on the unique contribution of a Catholic order—the Society of Jesus—to the making of long-distance communication systems, travel routes, and information networks between Europe and Asia. Givon completed his Ph.D. in history at the Tel Aviv University School of Historical Studies. His dissertation, “Jesuit Communication Networks and the Global Ming-Qing Transition,” focused on the reconstruction of Jesuit communication and news channels between China and Europe during the dynastic transition from Ming (1368–1644) to Qing (1644–1911).

During 2021–22 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is also an alumnus of international programs in Chinese studies at the University of Turin and Renmin University in Beijing, and a graduate of the Azrieli Foundation Fellows Program.​ In 2022, Givon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research in the Department of History at Harvard University.

Givon's recent publications include:

Givon, Y. (2023) “The Afterlife of Eurasian Long-distance Correspondence: From Jesuit Epistle to European Print,” Journal of Early Modern History (published online ahead of print 2023): 1–25.

Givon, Y. (2023) “Not Just a Textual Fossil: John Bell’s Travels from St Petersburg (1763),” Journal of History of Ideas Blog (Online, February 2023).

Givon, Y. (2022). “Connecting Eurasia: Jesuit Experimentation with Overland Mobility between China and Europe, 1656–1664,” Journal of World History 33, no. 4.

Givon, Y. (2019). “A Tale of Dynastic Change in China: The Ming-Qing Transition through Athanasius Kircher SJ’s China illustrata (1667),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 88, no. 1: 49–101.

Givon, Y. (2016). “Sinophile among Sinophobes? John Bell (1691–1780) and the Image of China in the Travel Literature of Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Historia 36 (2016): 89–112. [Hebrew]