2024

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. During his tenure at the University of Cambridge, he aims to revise and publish his doctoral thesis on the transnational history of psychical research in early 20th century China, particularly its impact on Chinese notions of healthcare and religious experience. He also intends to start his second book project, “Healing Through the Mind: The Rise of Mind-Cure Movements in Modern East Asia,” which will further develop his interest in the global history of psy-sciences and mental health in East Asia by investigating the rise of transnational mind-cure movement and their impact on local psychotherapeutic cultures in 20th century China and Japan

 

Yize Hu will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. His book project, “Resilience of Systems: Technocracy and Information Society in Japan, 1960s -1980s,” examines the impact of the engineering concept of “system” on the Japanese technocratic culture and capitalism between the 1960s and 1980s. Initially adopted by a technocratic coalition of engineers, economists, bureaucrats, and executives in the late 1960s, the system approach served as methodology for them to understand social issues and realize a utopian vision of an “Information Society.” He will pursue this project at the University of Kyoto, which will become the foundation of his next project, “Information Systems, Social Governance, and the Digital Landscape of East Asia.”

 

Sungeun Kim will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. His project, “Charting the Shattered Sea: Territorial Conflicts and East Asian Oceanography in the 20th Century,” examines how geopolitical tensions in three different periods during the 20th century conditioned geoscientific practices in the East Sea (also known as Sea of Japan) which is surrounded by four countries, South and North Korea, Japan, and Russia. At the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (Department II), he will extend his doctoral thesis into a book, which contributes to the history earth science by highlighting the co-production of geopolitical regimes and geoscientific knowledge, especially in non-Western context.

 

 

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS

 

Pang-Yen Chang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. His dissertation, “Measuring Chinese Minds: Intelligence, Race and Nationalism in Modern China,” examines diverging yet interlinked ways in which Chinese scientists measured Chinese mental capacity in the first half of the twentieth century. He argues that the inquiry into Chinese mental capacity formed a pivotal part of Chinese intellectuals’ mindset during the era, as they attempted to make sense of why China had experienced a series of defeats by imperial powers. The study identifies four principal kinds of practice that sought to quantify Chinese mental capacity—craniometry, neuroanatomy, intelligence testing, and historiometry. He argues that these seemingly objective set of numbers was, in reality, conditioned by the uneven and rapid changing Chinese society in the first half of the century.

Coleman Rubin Mahler will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. His dissertation, “Information and the State in Rural China, 1945-1980,” analyzes the efforts of postwar Chinese states on Mainland China and Taiwan to gather economic and social data for policies including central economic planning and land reform. He examines how People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Republic of China (ROC) each mobilized personnel, technologies, and scientific techniques to gather necessary data and why each got the different results in the end. He claimed that the government in Taiwan got the better results largely owing to the inheritance of Japanese cadastral maps, American funding, and American scientific expertise.

Lillian Tsay will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2024-2025. Her dissertation, “Sweetening the Empire: The Making of Western-Style Confectionery in Modern Japan and Taiwan (1868-1952),” examines how Western-style confectionery such as caramel, chocolate, chewing gum, and other sweets became intertwined with Japan’s empire-building by focusing on nutrition and body politics. She posits the Western-style confectionery as a product of new technology that was made possible through the support of capital and empire. This work also engages with business and marketing history by showing how three major confectionery companies advocated for the consumption of their products as a signifier of Japanese modernity.