2023

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

2023--Yiyung-Peng Yiyun Peng will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2023-2024. Her book project is “The Herbaceous Revolution: How Crop-Based Handicraft Industries Transformed Upland Southeast China, 1500-1970.” This study scrutinizes a few important handicraft industries that processed perennial herbs into commodities—indigo dye, ramie cloth, tobacco, and bamboo paper—in upland Southeast China. This highland-centered approach refreshes our understanding on the economy of late imperial and modern China, which has long focused on lowland production of rice, cotton, and silk, and also ushers in a rethinking of the highlands as a complex and active economic and technological system.

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS

Chiali Chu will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2023-2024. The title of his dissertation is, “Harvesting Diversity: Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Politics of International Agricultural Research, 1960-2000.” He focuses on the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC), a research institute founded in Taiwan in 1971 for the adaptation of vegetables to the humid tropics. The study will show how the AVRDC has successfully evolved through both the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods with its distinctive visions of “created and conserved diversity.” It will be an important addition to our understanding of relationship among science, politics, and economic development in Asia.
2023--Po-Hsun-Chen Po-Hsun Chen will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2023-2024. The title of his dissertation is, ‘Negotiating Herbal Toxicity for Modern Imaginaries of Diasporic Chinese Countries: Controversies of Herbal Toxicities in Taiwan and Singapore after World War II.” The study aims to determine how Chinese medicine mediates nationalism, Chinese cultural identity and ethnicity in diasporic Chinese countries, how medical technology redefines the concept of herbal toxicity, redesigns the regulation of herbs and reshapes the image of the diasporic Chinese countries, and how the development of Chinese medicine involves the national projects of modernization and of globalization for diasporic countries.
Yang Li will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2023-2024. Her dissertation is, “Antibiotics, Scientific Expertise, and Pharmaceutical Marketplace in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1990.” Highlighting the materiality of the antibiotic drug, this study will contribute to the understanding of the global spread of the therapeutic revolution and the making of China’s medical infrastructure by showing how medicine was deeply intertwined with scientific development and socialist industrialization. By analyzing HuaPharm, she will show how China was transformed from a technology receiver (from the Soviet Union) to technology disseminator. She will also examine the impact of antibiotics on the healthcare system, the culture of antibiotics, and perception of diseases.
Sumin Myung will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2023-2024. His dissertation is, “Crafting Forests, Claiming Futures: Forest Sciences and the Politics of Anthropogenic Forests in South Korea.” The study is concerned with the ecological, political, and historical stakes of reforestation and forest sciences in the context of postcolonial South Korea. He will investigate how forest scientists’ quotidian practices, tools, and infrastructures of knowledge production have engaged with the residues of imperialism, war, and nation-building while claiming more habitable futures for the national public and global audiences through anthropogenic forest regeneration.

RESEARCH AND TRAVEL GRANTS

Mengliu Chang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year of 2023-2024. She is currently working on her dissertation that examines how “scientific farming” was conceived, articulated, and practiced by a broad spectrum of actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century China. Challenging the conventional historiography, her dissertation examines the diverse infrastructures of knowledge production and dissemination, as well as the agency of revolutionaries, entrepreneurs, missionaries, or even dilettantes. She will travel to Hubei and Hunan in July 2023 for her archival research.
Hosanna Fukuzawa will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year of 2023-2024. He will explore “imu,” a culture-bound syndrome of the Ainu in Japan. Through the archival research, he will examine the process in which the modern understanding of imu was created, how it came to be claimed to have vanished, and the complex interplay of power, modernization, and medicalization of cultural knowledge and expression. He will travel to Sapporo in Hokaido, Japan, for his archival research during the academic year of 2023-2024.
2023--Yaming-You Yaming You will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year of 2023-2024. She is currently working on her dissertation that explores the material history of the syringe and artifactual biography injection therapy in modern China from the 1920s to the 1970s. She argues that as the syringe travelled between two medical systems (Traditional Chinse Medicine and western medicine) during the early and mid-twentieth century, a new hybrid body (“syringe body”) was born to accommodate the demands of two drastically different ways of knowing and treating the body in Chinese medicine and biomedicine. She will travel to Shanghai in October 2023 for her research.