2022

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

 

Spencer D. Stewart will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2022-2023. The title of his book project is “Seeds of Construction: Cotton Science and Economic Change in Twentieth-Century China.” The book will investigate how China, a relatively minor player in the global economy in the early twentieth century, came to dominate global cotton production and cotton textile manufacturing today. He will challenge historiographical assumptions about the economic and scientific losses of China’s many political and social revolutions to argue that the history of Chinese cotton industry in the twentieth century is the sustained institutional and capacity building. The book will show that China’s “rise” in the later part of the twentieth century wasn’t simply the result of economic reform but was the product of nearly a century of scientific and social experimentation.

Wuyutong Yao will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2022-2023. She will expand her doctoral dissertation to the book whose title is “Medicine Workers in the Mountains: Upland Gatherers in the Min River Valley and China’s Natural Medicinal Products Trade in Modern Times (1890-1960).” She will argue that throughout the twentieth century, medicine gatherers, with their skills, techniques and knowledge, contributed significantly to developing China’s modern pharmaceutical industry. She will illustrate how the gatherers, through the deployment of their socially-interactive “knowledge-through-work” and resulting specially skilled labor, supplied the essential resources for the “natural” medicinal trade throughout its transformation. As the first major historical study of non-industrial laborers in China’s pharmaceutical industry, the book will widen our perspective on the triangular relationship among nature, human labor, and knowledge.

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2022-2023. The title of his dissertation is “The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Healthcare and the Revival of the Occult in a Modernizing China, 1900–1949.” He will examine the history of “Spiritual Science (xinling kexue),” and its impact on healthcare and religious experience during the period. He will argue that the movement emerged as the Chinese response to the global anxieties stirred up by scientific materialism and religious doubt between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He will also show how Spiritual Science played in China’s search for modernity and state-building projects and how it has inspired later movements such as qigong in the 1990s and Body-Mind-Spirit today. The project aims to contribute to Chinese and global studies in medical history, science and technology studies, and the history of psychology.

Yoehan Oh will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2022-2023.  The title of his dissertation is “Navigating Webs of Platform Imperialism.” The project will investigate the socio-technical history of Naver, a South Korean online service and search giant. He will argue that Naver’s success and influence can be traced to four major socio-technical decisions between the 1990s and 2010s. All the four were intended to internalize Naver’s socio-technical resources and safeguard those from “glocal” conflicts. These decisions enabled Naver to navigate through and survive an Americentric/Anglophone (and recently Sinocentric) research marketplace and to situate itself as an independently growing force in contemporary international A.I. research and applications and data management sectors, at the cost of more compatibility with the U.S. American-aligned research and development ecosystems.

Yiyun Peng will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2022-2023. The title of her dissertation is, “The Herbaceous Economy: Environment, Technology, and Market in Upland Southeast China, 1550-1970.” She will focus on herbaceous cash crops (such as indigo, ramie, bamboo, and tobacco) that became important foundations of the highland economy during this period. The project will provide a comprehensive survey of the economy, environment, and technology in upland Southeast China through those widespread crops and handicraft industries, and reveal how the highlanders utilized and reshaped the landscape and how the state perceived and managed the region. It will widen our understanding of the economy of late imperial and modern China, which used to center mainly on the lowland production of rice, cotton, and silk.

Rachel Wallner will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2022-2023. The title of her dissertation is “Science and Technology in Troubled Waters: The Transnational Construction of the South China Sea, 1890-1947.” By examining maps, texts, and thought paradigms that imprinted ocean spaces onto the Chinese imagination, the project will show that while conflict heightened maritime concerns in China, the connection through science and technology shaped enduring Chinese perspectives of the sea. She will also show that late-Qing and Republican-era science practitioners mattered and were an integral part of the international science community, and that their work helped shape China as a nation-state and, therefore, its interactions with the world.

RESEARCH AND TRAVEL GRANTS

Xu Chang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year 2022-2023. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Medicine on the March: Military Institutions, Medical Networks, and Qing Empire, 1644-1800,” will explore military medicine in Qing garrisons during the period of imperial expansion to Inner Asia (1640-1800). She will particularly investigate a variety of medical practices in garrisons stationed on the northern frontier, current day Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang. She will visit the Liaoning Provincial Archives in Shenyang, China to examine Chinese and Manchurian official documents to explore how the state organized medicine in military institutions in Manchuria.

Jaeyoung Ha will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year 2022-2023. His project entitled “Blood, Sweat, and Tears:  South Korea’s Mountain Enclosure Campaign, 1945-1980” examines the intersection of frontierism, development, and scientific management of land on the South Korean highlands in the post-1945 period. He will examine how the South Korean government launched various development programs in agriculture, mining, and forestry in remote mountains, partly in reaction to the American blueprint to build an industrialized anticommunist state after 1945. He will travel to the National Archives, College Park, MD for research during the summer of 2022.

Heewan Kim will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research grant for the academic year 2022-2023. Her project entitled “Finding Culture in Japanese Face: From Paul Ekman’s Display Rules to Takeo Kanade’s Facial Data” examines the concept of culture, which has emerged in the field of facial expressions and emotions research in the United States and Japan since the late 1960s. She will illustrate how culture was mobilized and reconfigured in studying faces, either for developing a theory or constructing data. She will visit the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution and Takeo Kanade’s Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University to access unpublished papers that document the process of developing their ideas in studying the Japanese face.