Science and Technology Seminar Series

Convened by Professor Victor Seow, Department of the History of Science, the Asia Center Science and Technology Seminar Series focuses on critical historical and contemporary issues in science and technology in East, South, and Southeast Asia.

The seminar series seeks to bring to campus speakers from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences whose work investigates the place of the scientific and the technological in Asia and the place of Asia in our ideas and practices of science and technology. 

 

UPCOMING SEMINARS

Fall 2021 

Tuesday, September 14, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

The Sun's Two Faces: Solar Power in India, 1877-2021

Speaker: Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago

 

Tuesday, September 28, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

"Those Who Fall Behind Get Beaten Up": Can Science Build a Strong China?

Speaker: Yangyang Cheng, Yale University       

 

Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

Insuring Weather: Climate Futures Past in the Indian Ocean World     

Speaker: Debjani Bhattacharya, Drexel University 

 

Tuesday, October 26, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in 20th-Century Japan

Speaker: Victoria Lee, Ohio University 

 

Tuesday, November 9, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

Pronouns for an Apocalyptic Future

Speaker: Juno Salazar Parreñas, Cornell University 

                       

Tuesday, November 30, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

Manufacturing Electronics in Taiwan, 1966-1975: Emulation, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Speaker: Honghong Tinn, University of Minnesota 

 

Tuesday, December 7, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in 18th-Century Korea

Speaker: Jisoo Kim, George Washington University 

 

Tuesday, December 14, 2021, 10:30-11:45 a.m.  

How to Come Apart: Decomposing a History of Translation in China              

Speaker: Carla Nappi, University of Pittsburgh 

 

PAST SEMINARS

Spring 2021

Claire Edington-Drugs, Willpower and the Biopolitics of Addiction in Colonial Vietnam

Thomas Mullaney-The Chinese BIOS Sphere: How East Asian Computing Hacked Modernity

Todd Henry-Layer Matters: Medical Authority, Body Conformity, and Intersex Livelihood in Cold War South Korea

Ruselle Meade-The Kyūri-bon Boom and the Public Perception of Science in Early-Meiji Japan

Asif Siddiqi-"Practically No Habitation": The Yanadi Community and the Colonial Violence of Spaceflight

Shellen Wu-Mapping Science in a Global Age: the Human Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge

Yumi Kim-Madness in the Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Family: Writing Away from Psychiatry

 

Fall 2019

Projit Bihari Mukharji, Between the Yogi and the Commissar: Imagining Decolonial Science in Postcolonial India, C. 1952-1977

Jung Lee and Hyungsub Choi, Thinking with Technology from the History of Korea

Susan Burns, Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body: Forensic Medicine, Gender, and the Courts in Modern Japan

 

Spring 2019

Jennifer Robertson, Digital Hormones: Emotional Humanoids and Spiritual Humans

Dagmar Schäfer, Lists, Local Gazetteers, and the True Lies of Premodern China's Patterns of Social Mobility

Jayita Sarkar, The First Battlefield of Western Nuclear Competition: India and Light Water Reactors, 1955-1963

 

Fall 2018

Marta Hanson-Heaven and Earth Are Within One's Grasp (Qian Kun zai wo 乾坤在握): The Handy Mind in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine

Soyoung Suh-Breast, Cancer, and Women in Korea, 1800–1930s

Suzanne Moon-Reporting Indonesia's Green Revolution