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, “The Allure of Health: Medicines and Market Capitalism in Modern Korea, 1896–1965,” traces the origins and spread of two types of medicines—tonifying preparations (kangjangje) and nutritional preparations (yŏngyangje)—from the 1890s in late Chosŏn Korea through the mid-1960s in South Korea. By reconstructing the social lives of these medicinal commodities, which are the predecessors of today’s health supplements, she demonstrates how capitalist, consumerist, and medical cultures intersected to shape modern concepts of health (kŏn’gang) and practices of managing it in South Korea. At Johns Hopkins, she will work on a book manuscript, based on her dissertation, that further explores the complex identities of medicines as moving objects, commodities, and technologies, situating Korea’s story in comparative, global contexts. |
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. |