Mackenzie A. Fox

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hyme
Email: maf2292@columbia.edu

Mackenzie is a Ph.D. candidate studying Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) intellectual and cultural history. Before coming to Columbia, he received a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures and History from Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

His research challenges the standard narrative that Song intellectual life was dominated by the rise of Neo-Confucianism and other systematic philosophies. Drawing on sources ranging from technical treatises to prefaces and literary miscellany, he argues that Song intellectual culture can be seen as a repertoire, with literati drawing contextually on multiple frameworks including, to cite just a few examples, empirical rigor, Confucian moral philosophy (including Neo-Confucianism), and aesthetic ideals such as self-expression, rather than rigidly adhering to any single systematic vision.

His dissertation examines how this intellectual plurality functioned in practice. It traces the development of rigorous empirical inquiry as a widely accepted mode of investigation, analyzes how systematic thinkers such as Zhu Xi engaged with particularistic and technical knowledge, and explores the defensive strategies literati used to justify their diverse interests. By attending to the gap between rhetorical justification and actual practice, the dissertation develops a new model for understanding Song intellectual culture as irreducibly plural, with implications for how we understand the nature of “orthodoxy” in both Song and later imperial China.