2018

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

 2018_Ya-Wen-Lei Ya-Wen Lei will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of her project is, “The Red Line: Negotiating the Parameters of Biotechnology in China within Global Context.” Recent practices of Chinese biologists in human gene editing triggered criticism from media and scientists in the United States and Europe, who argued that the Chinese had crossed an ethical “red line.” The project aims to understand the values, norms, and institutions involved in the debate regarding the application of gene-editing technology in China by examining the various literature. The findings will shed new light on the relationship between science, ethics, society, and politics, as well as broaden the debate in the West in relation to China. She will visit various STS centers in China and Europe during the period.
Ying Jia Tan Ying Jia Tan will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of his project is, “Powering Regime Change: The Electrification of Revolutionary China, 1882-1962.” He argues that the mobilization for war in the 20th century led to the nationalization and standardization of the electrical power sector on mainland China and Taiwan. The project offers three new perspectives on the history of war and revolution in China: first, it explains how the Communist and Kuomintang regimes reasserted economic sovereignty during the quest for national unification; second, the power systems originated from wartime projects; and third, it examines how decades of war and revolution shaped and defined China’s views of “energy security.” He will concentrate on finishing his book project at Wesleyan University during the period.
 2018-StaceyVanVleet Stacey A. Van Vleet will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of her project is, “Plagues, Precious Pills, and the Politics of Learning in Modern China.” It aims to examine how the vast network of Buddhist medical institutions brought Tibetan and Mongolian technologies to the heart of imperial governance as the Qing Empire expanded over Inner Asia. She argues that for Inner Asian elites including Tibetans, Mongolians, and the ruling Manchus, Tibetan medicine became a primary field through which to establish effective and beneficial governance in a Buddhist idiom. Drawing on a range of Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian sources, the project will contribute to conversations on the history of religion, science, and secularism. She will spend her postdoctoral year at Harvard University.

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS

 2018--peter-branden Peter W. Braden will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of his dissertation is, “Years of the Ox: Bovine Experiences in China’s Civil War and Socialist Revolution, 1946-1961.” He will analyze the experiences of cattle during and after China’s 1949 socialist revolution by examining various primary sources on the diet, workload, medical treatment and sexuality of cattle deposited in the mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UN in New York. He will integrate these materials with modern scientific literature on animal behavior and physiology to show how social tumult and technological transformation in the realm of humans affected the inner and outer lives of Chinese cattle during the middle of the twentieth century.
2018--Kelly-MIdori-McCormick Kelly Midori McCormick will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of her dissertation is, “Camera Wars: Photography in the Remaking of Japan, 1930-1970.”  She argues that the camera played a central role in re-making Japanese culture after World War II. Freed from its wartime mobilization as weapon of the state, it became a tool for female photojournalists and students who raised cameras instead of Molotov cocktails in political protest in the late 1960s. By drawing on the history of technology, the history of photography, the history of design, and the history of consumer culture, her dissertation will revise the male-centered narratives of postwar optical technologies and photographic practice, and show why the history of technology and consumer culture had radical effects on both the history of images and image making.
2018-youjungshin Youjung Shin will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of her dissertation is, “From Big Theory to Big Data:
The Formation of Brain Science across the Pacific.” It will analyze the formation of brain science across the Pacific during the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods when the emphasis on big science in brain research has changed from establishing a big theory to handling big data. She argues that the evolution of the idea of big science was crucial in shaping the new discipline, brain science, in South Korea. The dissertation will also emphasize the distinctive roles of the developmental state and ambitious discipline builders from different disciplinary backgrounds. It will pay special attention to multiple intellectual sources of brain science, including cybernetics, cognitivism, and behaviorism, contrasting their interplay in the U.S. and that in South Korea.
 2018-Wijeyerante Nissanka Subodhana M. Wijeyeratne will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of his dissertation is, “Red Sun Rising: Rocketry, the Space Age, and the Cold War in Japan.” He will explore why Japan chose to establish a space research program in the aftermath of defeat in World War II, how this space program actually came to be realized, and how this enterprise was presented and received within Japan. The dissertation aims to break the geo-political and temporal binaries of USA/USSR, postwar/prewar, and technological pioneer/technological laggard. He will continue his field work in Japan during the summer and fall of 2018 in order to complete the necessary analyses.

RESEARCH AND TRAVEL GRANTS

2018--Shoan-yin-Cheung2 Shoan Yin Cheung, will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. She will visit Tokyo, Japan in the summer of 2018 to interview several Japanese who were involved in petitioning and approving the contraceptive uses of the pill and the therapeutic uses of the pill. It will be an important part of her dissertation, “The Pill’s Therapeutic Transformations in Low-Growth Japan” that aims to examine the adoption of hormonal birth control pill in Japan. In elucidating how local understandings of medicine and the state’s reproductive needs ultimately shape and limit the pill’s use in Japan, this study will bring to light the limits of pharmaceutical efforts to transform well-being into a commodity.
2018--Howard-Chiang2 Howard Chiang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. He will visit Shanghai, China to examine the publications related to psychoanalysis, mental health, and koro in Republican-era scientific and medical journals at Shanghai Public Library. His project “The Politics of Mental Health in Global Chinese Culture” aims to connect two seemingly unconnected developments of (1) the intensified collaboration between organizations across national borders to achieve health equity among all humans on global scale and (2) the rise of China as a superpower that has fundamentally recalibrated a Western-centric world economy that characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
 2018-Sumin-Myung Sumin Myung will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. He will collect necessary data in Seoul, Korea and Washington D.C. during the summer of 2018. His project “Instituting Nature: The Unfolding of the Field of Sciences in Cold War South Korea, 1963-1979” focuses on a particular group of field scientists—the Korean Commission for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources—in Cold War South Korea. With the international assistance, they not only established their respective disciplines at the university level but also tried to “institute” modern nature, i.e. nature conservation, through publication, public activities, and long-term fieldwork in the Korean peninsula.
 2018--Y-peng2 Yiyun Peng will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. She will travel to Longyan, Fujian, China during the summer of 2018 for her dissertation on “Moving Beyond Mountains: Commodity Circulation and Migration in Southeast China, 1550-1900.” The project focuses on the inland, mountainous Tingzhou region, and explores its handicraft industries in the past few centuries, including indigo dye, paper, charcoal, and tobacco. She plans to observe the production processes of tobacco and paper, to examine a special collection of documents on tobacco production in the Qing and Republic eras, and to conduct interviews with local peasants and producers.
 2018--wang Weichu Wang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. She will travel to Shanghai, China for her research at the Shanghai Municipal Archive during the summer of 2018. Her dissertation, “Repairing Socialism: Industrial Maintenance in Socialist China, 1949-1966,” aims to offer an institutional and social history of repair and maintenance (R&M) in Chinese textile industry from 1949 to 1966. It will explore how state planners, factory managers, technicians and workers conceptualized R&M activities and translated their theories into institutional arrangements. She will also analyze R&M activities on the shop floor since they mutually shaped worker identities, shop floor politics and gender relations.
 2018_Miaofeng_Yao Miaofeng Yao will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. He will travel to Shanghai, China to research on policy records at Shanghai Municipal Library. His project, “Investigating Typewriter Theft in the Republic of China: The Value of Typewriters to Chinese and American Officials,” analyzes Shanghai Police investigation records in light of historical developments in typewriter technology and use, including the developing role of the typewriter in creating official bureaucratic records and on-going relationships between Chinese and American typewriter inventions and manufacturing. It is a part of his larger comparative project focusing on industrial and technological interactions between typewriter designers and manufacturers in China and the United States.

CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP GRANTS

 2018-Lin-yi Lin-Yi Tseng will receive a D. Kim Foundation Conference/Workshop Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year.  She will travel to Glasgow, Scotland to attend the 2018 European Association for Chinese Studies Biennial Conference where she will present her study on “The Deer Industry and Velvet-Antler Consumption in Taiwan.” She aims to reconstruct the history of Chinese society’s production and consumption of medicinal liquor, with special focus on such animal materials as velvet-antler and tiger bones.
 2018-Shu-yi-Want Shu-Yi Wang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Conference/Workshop Grant for the 2018-2019 academic year. She will travel to Montreal, Canada to attend the Interdisciplinary Conference on Leprosy and the Leper Reconsidered where she will present a paper entitled “From International Collusion to Collaboration – Preserving Colonial Leprosaria in Asia.” She intends to examine four colonial leprosy settlements in Asia to investigate the juxtaposition of their approaches to historical preservation between institutional and local contexts.