Overview
As a historian of medicine and public health in twentieth-century China, I use insights from gender and feminist studies, history of emotions, and history of the senses to ask questions about my core obsession: the relationship between a mortal, physical self, and our lived social selves. Historians eschew universals because our research calls attention to particulars and variations across space and time. We can, for example, trace the history of the color pink from a boy’s color to a girl’s color, the history of marriage from a bond between two family lineages meant to anchor a whole social structure to a companionate match between two individual people engaged in “free love,” and the role of children as miniature adults dressed in small-sized adult clothing and completing onerous chores (on the family farm or in a factory) to our current understanding of childhood as a neurologically distinct period of human life when play and whimsy are central to healthy development. This ability to historicize anything and reveal the surprising complexity of what we consider “normal” is just one of the many things that makes historians so cool!
But there are some undeniable universals, and the body is their container. We all have mothers who created and birthed our bodies with their own, thereby granting us the impossibly improbable and miraculous chance at life on this precious planet (fathers matter too of course, but less so in the birthing of the flesh). We all have bodies that are subject to disease, debility, and decay. We all must relinquish our bodies upon our inevitable deaths. And our bodies that are marked and constrained by these three universals – birth, disease, and death – are also deliciously diverse. The structural forces in human societies that define and delineate what we can do with our lives – race, class, occupation, gender, sex, sexuality, physical ability, nationality, political status, etc. – take shape in and on and between our bodies. Flesh marks us socially and politically. How we experience and feel – and feel about – our bodies is profoundly influenced, if not entirely constrained, by the forces they are subjected to. That is why the human body is the focal point of all my work. It is a story that is simultaneously rooted in the miniscule cells of an individual body and bound to the fundamental elements that burst into life in the Big Bang, the star dust in each of our cells.
I teach courses on the history of modern China, Chinese medicine, global health, and the global history of medicine. If you are a student at Duke or a nearby university, please be a part of my classes!
I currently advise a cohort of amazing graduate students - Yaming You 尤雅茗, Tianlin Wang 王天霖, Ting-Yu Cai 蔡庭玉, Haocong Cheng 程昊聪, Yiqun Mao 毛逸群, and Mingkang Hao/MK 郝明康 - but I am sorry to say that I am no longer accepting new PhD students for the time being. I will update this website once I am accepting students again.
