Participants (organized alphabetically)

Sare Aricanli (University of Durham)

Dr Sare Aricanli is Assistant Professor of Early Modern and Modern China at Durham University, UK. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of medicine, with a particular interest in broader geographical, temporal, and cultural connections. Her recent work has, for example, discussed the activities of a seventeenth-century Chinese author of popular medical texts, as well as shared medical and cultural worlds of equine and human care. She is completing a monograph on pluralities, institutional reorganization, and cultural exchanges within Chinese state medicine over the long eighteenth century.

Florence Bretelle-Establet (University Paris Diderot)

Florence Bretelle-Establet is researcher in CNRS at SPHERE (UMR 7219, CNRS & Université Paris Cité) and works on the social and cultural history of medicine in late imperial China. Author of La santé en Chine du Sud, 1898-1928 (2002), she has published articles and book chapters on the history of medicine in late imperial China and co-edited several books, notably, Looking at It from Asia: The processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science (2010), Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts (2018), and Making Sense of Health, Disease, and the Environment in Cross-Cultural History (2019).

Eléonore Caro (EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) Paris)

Eléonore Caro is a PhD student at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) Paris, in the CCJ (China, Korea, Japan) joint lab under the supervision of Alain Arrault (EFEO, CCJ). Her PhD dissertation in History “The magic-medical practices in Early China: texts and objects”, aims at reinterpreting the so-called magic medicine in Early China using excavated sources dated from the Warring States (475-221 BC) to the Han (206 BC-220 AD), in order to provide a new definition to this kind of medicine. For the purpose of her PhD research, Eléonore Caro is translating all her excavated sources into French. She is organizing a workshop on October 10th on the question of the translation of technical texts from Eastern to Western languages. Eléonore Caro is taking up a position as a teaching assistant for ancient China at Aix en Provence.

Cheng Hsiao-wen (University of Pennsylvania)

Hsiao-wen Cheng is associate professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China (University of Washington Press, 2021). Her research interests include gender and sexuality, medicine, religion, and intellectual history of premodern China.

Cheng Wan-Chun (University Erlangen-Nuremberg)

Wan-Chun Cheng holds a Ph. D. from the Department of Chinese Medicine at the Chinese Medical University, Taiwan. She has obtained a Master of Arts degree from the Department of East Asian Studies at the National Taiwan Normal University (2012) and a Bachelor's of Arts degree from the Department of Chinese Literature and the Department of Japanese Language and literature at the Soochow University, Taiwan (2009). Prior to her stay in Erlangen, she was a recipient of a PhD student scholarship of the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica. Now she is a visiting fellow in IKGF (The International Consortium for Research in the Humanities) at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her current research project is about crystals, "Material Culture and Esoteric Practices of Crystals in Comparative Perspectives". And she will start a new topic as a postdoctoral fellow for the DFG Kollegforschungsgruppe on “Alternative rationalities and esoteric practices in global perspective.”

Constance (Connie) A. Cook (Lehigh University)

Constance A. Cook, Chair & Prof., Modern Languages and Literatures Department, Lehigh University; specialist in early Chinese inscriptions and manuscripts. Recent publications include: Medicine and Healing in Ancient East Asia: A View from Excavated Texts (Cambridge, forthcoming); Dice and Gods on the Silk Road: Chinese Buddhist Dice Divination and Its Transcultural Context, with Brandon Dotson and Zhao Lu (Brill, 2021); Birth in Ancient China: A Study of Metaphor and Cultural Identity in Pre-imperial China, with Luo Xinhui (SUNY, 2017); Stalk Divination: A Newly Discovered Alternative to the I Ching, with Zhao Lu (Oxford, 2017); Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao (Harvard, 2017).

Jean Corbi (Sciences Po Centre for History)

Jean Corbi is a PhD Student in contemporary history at Sciences Po (Center for History) in Paris. The title of his thesis is “Physicians and the State in late-Republican Sichuan, 1927-1949.” He is currently on a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Doctoral Fellowship.

Ruixuan Du (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Ruixuan Du completed her BA in cultural studies and European ethnology obtained her MA in 2020 with a thesis on external-medicine in seventeenth-century China. Du is a predoctoral fellow in Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science Berlin. Her PhD project deals with medical images, human and animal bodily waste as medication, as well as related artifacts in medical practices between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. She aims to illustrate an “imagined human body” through the study of medical practices.

Michal Erlich (Tel Aviv University)

Michal Erlich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. For the past twelve years Erlich has divided her time between Delhi and Tel Aviv, studying vernacular languages and conducting fieldwork. Her research explores current meanings of well-being in India’s specific and dynamic contexts as well as how individuals and communities in Hindu settings pursue well-being. Her research interests include new religious movements, the tradition of guru devotion (bhakti), marginalized and hybrid urban communities, and internal migration

James Flowers (Kyung Hee University)

: Dr. James Flowers completed his MA at the University of Technology, Sydney and his PhD in the Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, with the dissertation “Koreans Building a New World: Eastern Medicine Renaissance in the Context of Japanese Rule, 1910-1945.” He writes about transnational East Asian medical history. He has published on the history of medicine and science during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), traditional Korean medicine in Japan-ruled Korea (1910-1945), the Chinese medical diaspora in colonial-era to 21st-century Australia, and traditional medical doctors’ responses to COVID-19 in South Korea. His book manuscript Koreans Building a New World situates Korea as a node connecting medical practices and ideas across East Asia. Currently, he is a Brain Pool Program Research Fellow (National Research Foundation, Korea), Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.

Asaf Goldschmidt (Tel Aviv University)

Professor Asaf Goldschmidt is a professor of Chinese history in the department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also the director of the Confucius Institute in Tel Aviv University. Professor Goldschmidt obtained his Ph.D. in 1999 from the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of medicine and science in China, especially during the Song dynasty (960-1276 CE). His publications include the books titled The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song dynasty, 960–1200 and Medical Practice in Twelfth-century China – A Translation of Xu Shuwei’s Ninety Discussions [Cases] on Cold Damage Disorders. His next book focuses on the reconstruction of the medical encounter in twelfth-century China based on medical case records arising from various sources.

Marta Hanson (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Marta Hanson completed her PhD in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was Assistant Professor of the history of Late Imperial China at the University of California, San Diego (1997-2004) and then Associate Professor of the history of East Asian medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021). Currently, she’s a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She’s published widely on the history of medicine and public health in China and cross-cultural Sino-European medical history. Her book is Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011). Within cross-cultural medical history, she has an on-going scholarly collaboration with Gianna Pomata on 17th- to 18th-century translations of Chinese medical texts into European languages. She will present new research related to her current book manuscript “‘Grasping Heaven and Earth’ (Qian Kun zaiwo 乾坤在握): The Healer’s Body-as-Technology in Classical Chinese Medicine.”

Naama Cohen-Hanegbi (Tel Aviv University)

Naama Cohen-Hanegbi is a Senior Lecturer of Medieval History at Tel Aviv University. Her research explores medicine and health as prisms for cultural history of late medieval Southern Europe. Her book Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean (Brill, 2017) looks at the reciprocity between learned medicine and pastoral theology in their construction and treatment of emotions in the Western Mediterranean between 1200 and 1500. Recent publications include “Postpartum Mental Distress in Late Medieval Europe” in The Mediaeval Journal (2019) and "A Healthy Christian City: Christianizing Healthcare in Late Fourteenth Century Seville," forthcoming in Journal of Medieval History.

Brian Po-Huei Hsieh (University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana)

Brian Po-Huei Hsieh is a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his MA in the Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. He is a historian of medicine working on the pictures of the inner organs of the human body in the history of Chinese medicine from the 10th to the 19th centuries, with a focus on the relationship between the visualizations of human body and the theories of pulse-diagnostics in Chinese medical history.

Joan Judge (York University)

Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto. A cultural historian of print and knowledge in modern China, she is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996). She is currently engaged in a project with the working title “China’s Mundane Revolution: Vernacular Knowledge and the Rise of the Common Reader, 1894-1954.”

Natalie Köhle (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Natalie is historian of Chinese medicine with comparative interests in the history of Indian, Tibetan, and medieval Greco-Islamic medical traditions, and the contemporary history of Chinese animal drugs. She’s a Harvard graduate who is currently an Assistant Professor at the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong. She works on two book projects: one on the longue durée history of Donkey Hide Gelatin (ejiao 阿膠), and one on the global history of Chinese phlegm. She has also published an experimental edited volume, Fluid Matter(s): A Cross-cultural Examination of the Imagination of the Humoral Body (co-edited with Shigehisa Kuriyama), which explores the use of interactive, image-based storytelling for academic communication.

Mayan Lalush (Hebrew University)

Mayan Lalush is a PhD student at the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her MA, was supervised by Prof. Liat Kozma of the Hebrew University and dealt with the medical discourse about sex and sexuality in 1930s Egypt. Today, Mayan explores gynecology and obstetrics in Algeria under French colonialism, focusing on the medicalization of mothers, medical practitioners, and prostitutes over the first half of the 20th century. Her dissertation is co-supervised by Prof. Liat Kozma (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Dr. Benoît Pouget (Aix-Marseille Université). Mayan's paper titled: "Healthcare institutions in Algeria: Curing mothers and babies during the first half of the 20th century."

Efraim Lev (Haifa University)

Efraim Lev is a full professor at the Department of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. Since 2020 he is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa. He spent his post-doctoral period at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and was later a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Prof. Lev was trained as field biologist, historian and archeologist; lately he focuses on the research of history of medicine and pharmacology in the medieval Muslim lands using mainly Jewish sources.

Lan Li (Johns Hopkins)

Dr Lan Li is a historian of the body, focusing on medicine and health in global East Asia. They received their Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Society Studies from MIT in 2016 and served as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University before joining the medical humanities program and department of history faculty at Rice University. Their book manuscript, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine, is under review at Johns Hopkins University Press. Their second project centers on a transnational history of numbness, which situates numbness, or ma 麻, in categories of flavor and food before tracking its transformation into a pathological side effect. They co-founded and co-hosted the exhibition Metaphors of the Mind, served as the editor of eikon in positionspolitics.org, are currently East Asian book reviews editor for Asian Medicine, and have collaborated in film and media work with medical practitioners in Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, New York, Boston, and Houston. They just accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Amir Mazor (Haifa University)

Dr Amir Mazor is a Research Associate at Haifa University, The Department of Israel Studies and The Interdisciplinary Center for the Broader Application of Genizah Research. Mazor is an historian specializing in the late medieval Middle East and Islam. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the early Mamluk Sultanate (1260-1340) and also published several studies on the Jews in Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk period, on Jewish doctors in Egypt and Syria in the Middle Ages, and on the representation of various Jewish figures - especially Maimonides - in medieval Muslim sources.

Joachim Prackwieser (Charite, Berlin)

Joachim Prackwieser is a PhD student at the Institute of Chinese Life Sciences, Charité, Medical University, Berlin. His dissertation, “CHHM-DB: Computational Exploration of Historical Chinese Pharmaceutical Recipes from Handwritten Volumes,” is based on the Paul U. Unschuld Chinese medical manuscript collection at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. He has a publication coming out: Dehnbostel F, Kiefl J, Prackwieser J et al. “SimLeapTasteAI: Machine Learning Models for the Prediction and Understanding of Sweet Taste of Asian Plants Historically Used by Humans.” Pre-submitted to Nature Machine Intelligence; 2022.

Sarah Rivkin (Tri-State College of Acupuncture)

Sarah Rivkin has a BA from Northwestern University, an MS in Traditional East Asian Medicine from Touro University, and a doctorate in Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine from the Seattle Institute of East Asian Medicine. She has published in The Lantern, Medical Acupuncture, and Convergent Points. She is interested in the history of case records in China and the potential of the case record approach to teaching in the modern classroom.

Pierce Salguero (Penn State, Abington)

Pierce Salguero has a Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010). A transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, he is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and cross-cultural exchange. Pierce is professor of Asian history and religious studies at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the many facets of Buddhist medicine in medieval China and beyond, including a three-volume series on the global history of Buddhism and medicine published by Columbia University Press (2017, 2020, 2022).

Andrew Schonebaum (University of Maryland)

University of Maryland (United States) — Andrew Schonebaum is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and Chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is editor of Approaches to Teaching the Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), MLA, 2012, with Tina Lu, and Approaches to Teaching the Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus), MLA, 2022. In 2016 he published his first monograph, Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China (2016) with the University of Washington Press. His next book, under contract with UWP, is Classifying the Unseen: Curiosity, Fantasy and Common Knowledge in Early Modern China, due out in 2023.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (Tel Aviv University)

Prof. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn is the Head of the Zvi Yazetz School of Historical Studies. She is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on Islamic medicine, health and illness. After analyzing Ottoman hospitals and medical institutions, madness, military medicine, and more, her current research answers what was effective, efficient and safe medical care and services in the Arabic- and Turkish-speaking Ottoman Middle East.

Hilary Smith (University of Denver)

Hilary Smith is Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver, USA. Her first book, Forgotten Disease, examined the history of a disease in Chinese medicine from the 4th century to the 20th, and she is currently at work on a China-centered history of modern nutritional knowledge.

Thies Staack (CSMC, University of Hamburg)

Thies Staack earned his doctorate at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on the reconstruction of early Chinese bamboo manuscripts. As a postdoctorate, he first worked at the University of Heidelberg’s collaborative research centre “Material Text Cultures” for four years. Since 2019, he has been a principal investigator at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, where he has just started a new research project titled “Collecting and Exchanging Medical Recipes in the Age of Print: Recipe Manuscripts in 19th and early 20th Century China.”

Wu Chia-yun (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)

Chia-Yun Wu is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Sinology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Her thesis is titled “Talismans (Fu 符) for Healing Rituals among the Yao Ethnic Group (Early 19th- Late 20th Centuries).” Her research interests are focused on the text-image relationships in the history of East Asian religions, science, and medicine. She has also produced several articles regarding the collections of the Yao religious manuscripts in western libraries and museums.

Yi-Li Wu (University of Michigan)

Yi-Li Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. in history and an M.A. in international relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on the history of Chinese medicine focuses on the multiple intersections of society, culture, and the body, with special emphasis on the late imperial period (16th to 19th centuries). Her publications include Reproducing Women: Medicine, metaphor, and childbirth in late imperial China and articles on medical illustration, forensic medicine, the treatment of wounds, and Chinese views of Western anatomical science. She is currently completing a manuscript on the history of medicine for wounds and injuries in China.

SJ Zanolini (Johns Hopkins)

SJ Zanolini specializes in both the history and practice of Chinese medicine. They earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an M.S. in Oriental Medicine from Dongguk University at Los Angeles, and are currently a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. Their research interests encompass the relationship between diet and healing in medical practice, geographic and seasonal determinants of health and illness treatment, and the interplay between medical, religious, elite, and popular ideas in Chinese history.