POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS
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Kyoryen Hwang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027. His project, “Reinventing Japanese Bacteriology: Vaccines, Resistance, and the Making of Global Microbiology,” focuses on the experimental tradition of Japanese vaccine science and its reinvention during the Cold War period. It asks and answers how Japanese researchers, working through imperial and postwar networks across Asia, reshaped postwar microbiology and contemporary understandings of antimicrobial resistance. During the postdoctoral year at the UCLA, he aims to develop his doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript that illuminates Asian experimental systems as sites that re-specify the molecular, redefine global scales, and co-construct immunological knowledge. He will also start a new project tracing the emergence and trajectories of antimicrobial-resistance (AMR) research in Asia, a line of inquiry that originally grew out of his dissertation. |
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Sujin Elisa Han will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027. Her project “Health in the Market: A History of Supplements in Modern Korea, 1896-1963,” traces the social lives of medical commodities that became the predecessors of today’s health supplements. She will argue that the importation, manufacturing, marketing, and consumption of strengthening and nutritional medicines consolidated diverse concepts of the body, healing, and health drawn from traditional medicine, nutrition science, biomedicine, and state campaigns. At Johns Hopkins University, she will analyze various sourcing documents, visual materials, and publications from archives, museums, auction sites, and libraries in South Korea, Japan, and the United States to present a critical account about the constructed allure of supplements and their claims to efficacy. By addressing debates in the history of medicine, history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals, and socioeconomic transformations in modern Korea, she aims to offer a new perspective on the history of health. |
DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS
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Francis Aidan Newman will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027. His dissertation, “Weathering Disease: Bodily and Environmental Knowledge in the Qing Empire’s Tropical Borderlands,” is a social history of the body and the environment in the Qing Empire, focusing especially on nineteenth-century Taiwan and Fujian. He argues that multiple groups of knowledge makers – from Indigenous healers to imperial Qing officials – created different ways of knowing the body, reflecting their varied understandings of what constituted their environments. His study will illustrate how different visions of the body’s relationship to the environment were not only embroiled in projects of imperial expansion and resistance, but were also mediated through embodied encounters with climate and place. To strengthen his arguments, he will travel to Taipei, Beijing, and Cambridge (UK) for field works and archival research during the fellowship period. |
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Tze Ching Joy Zhu will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027. Her dissertation “Stabilizing Phenomena: Zhang Hongzhao’s Epistemologies of Geology (1919-1956),” argues that technology’s history is not linear or universal, but plural and locally articulated through diverse techne of making, observing and interpreting the world. Through the case of Zhang Hongzhao, a geologist and philologist who approached fossils, minerals, and geological formations as phenomena shaped by modes of perception and interpretation, she will show how Chinese intellectual traditions engaged modern science without being absorbed into Eurocentric teleologies of progress. By foregrounding Zhang’s heterogeneous practices, her dissertation will reveal how technologies of knowing and seeing can generate alternative epistemologies that unsettles the idea of a singular, universal trajectory of scientific modernity. |