Alexis Balmont, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar
Alexis Balmont, Ph.D., is a French sinologist and patristic scholar working at the intersection of Chinese studies, classical philology, Christian studies, and digital humanities. He holds dual doctorates in Chinese Studies from Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (EPHE-PSL) and in Oriental Studies from the Pontifical Oriental Institute (Rome), as well as advanced degrees in biblical exegesis, philosophy and theology, and engineering. Before joining Notre Dame, he was a visiting scholar at Peking University (2024–2025) and an Associate Researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2025–2026). He also holds honorary research positions at the Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations d'Asie Orientale (Paris), HiSoMA/Sources Chrétiennes (Lyon), the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies (Hong Kong), and the Zentrum zur Erforschung des Christlichen Ostens (Salzburg).
His published research examines the history of Christianity in medieval China, with a focus on Tang-dynasty Syriac Christian texts and their theological, textual, and cultural transmission. He is the author of Le christianisme chinois du haut Moyen Âge (Cerf), Syriac Christians in Tang China (OPO 24, Lit-Verlag), Textes chrétiens chinois du haut Moyen Âge (SC 658, Cerf), and multiple articles in academic journals, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religions, the Journal of the American Society for Pre-Modern Asia (ancient JOAS), Christiana Orientalia Periodica, Apocrypha, and T’oung Pao. He also serves as a Chief and Executive Editor of Classical Texts and Studies, an academic series based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong that gives Chinese-language scholars critical tools to work directly with foundational classical texts from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Each volume presents a critical edition of the source text—drawn from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, or Coptic literature—alongside a fully annotated Chinese translation, an introduction, indices, and updated bibliography. The series also publishes monographs and conference proceedings, in English or Chinese, engaging ancient languages with the Chinese-speaking scholarly world.
At Notre Dame, Balmont is developing a lexical database documenting the terminological diversity of Chinese Christian vocabulary across confessional traditions and across ancient (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac) and modern source languages (French, English, Italian, Spanish and German). The database is designed to serve both historians of Chinese Christianity and contemporary translators of patristic and medieval texts, and combines philological analysis with a computational lexicography framework developed to extract terminological correspondences from parallel-text corpora.