orcid.org/0000-0001-6785-8501
Academia.edu
Assistant Professor of History and Medical Humanities
School of Humanities & Lee Kong-Chian School of Medicine
Nanyang Technological University
48 Nanyang Drive, #05-12, Singapore 639818
新加坡南洋理工大學
人文學院，李光前醫學院
助理教授
Digital Humanities Project
PI PolyglotAsianMedicine.com
Editorial Projects
Editor Situating Medicine and Religion In Asia
_____________ Religion and Science in China
Co-Editor Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine
_____________Asian Medicine and COVID-19
_____________Pacific Neighbourhood Consortium
Receiving editor Palgrave Encyclopedia of Health Humanities
An historian of Chinese Medicine and Religion, I focus on formative processes in the early Imperial period, and also on the modern Sinophone diaspora. I received my PhD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, an MA from the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, and also have a clinical degree in Chinese medicine.
My research concerns the intersections between divers forms of cultural knowledge and Chinese medicine, whether religion, botany, trade or modern biology and policy. I use close reading, participant interview, Digital Humanities (DH) methods and Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches. My articles and chapters can be found here.
My DH projects include digital maps of early Chinese pharmacopoeii, full-text archives of Buddhist, Daoist and Medical literature, as well as Peranakan and Malay text archives. The Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph interlinks traditional drug ethnonyms in Malay and Chinese with historical first appearance, modern botanical terms, and online TCM, biodiversity, and bioactivity databases. Tips and tricks and news about the projects can be found here on this website.
I’ve received the following awards, along with my collaborators:
Best Data Set, 2nd Runner-up. DH Awards.
John Cheung Endowment Award for Teaching.
#1 Top Ten Open Access Social Science Books, Routledge.
#13 New China Books of the Year.
Zhu Kezhen Junior Award (International Society for the History of East Asian Science Technology and Medicine ISHEASTM)
I’ve held research positions around the world including the Max Planck Institute; Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge; Academia Sinica, Taipei; the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge; the Forschungs Kolleg for Multiple Secularities at Leipzig University, and the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Pittsburgh. These positions have made me sensitive to the differences in research cultures, from institutional structures to intellectual priorities.
I’ve received grant funding from national and research institutions such as the Max Planck institute for the History of Science, the Wellcome Trust, Chiang-ching Kuo foundation, Henry Luce/ACLS Foundation, Ministries of Education in Taiwan and Singapore, Singapore National Heritage Board and others.
I serve as president of the International Association for the Study of Asian Medicine IASTAM, and am interested to develop structures to better support the visibility of and collaboration between researchers of Asian medicines. This builds on my previous experience as Treasurer and organising of four ICTAM conferences.
I also serve on the Daoist Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion allows me to support visibility of Daoist Studies within the larger field of Religious Studies, especially the work of junior scholars. An active member of ISHEASTM, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), I’m interested in organising panels and workshops, and organised the last conference for the History of Medicine in South East Asia conference (HOMSEA 2023). I’ve recently become co-chair of the Healing Arts pillar of the Comparative Global Humanities initiative at MIT, where we are building and interdisciplinary collective to consider better access to traditional health care and wisdom.
Medicine and Religion in China 