Science and Technology in Asia

The Science and Technology in Asia seminar series features talks on critical historical and contemporary issues in science, technology, medicine, and the environment in East, South, and Southeast Asia. It showcases some of the most exciting recent work in the humanities and social sciences that interrogates the place of the scientific and the technological in Asia and the place of Asia in our ideas and practices of science and technology.

This seminar series was founded in fall 2018 through the generous sponsorship of the Harvard University Asia Center. We now meet over Zoom roughly every other Tuesday, 10:30–11:45 am ET, during both fall and spring terms.
 

Spring 2026

January 27, 2026 | Denis Simon | "Evolving U.S.-China S&T Relations in an Era of Rising Geopolitical Tensions" | Register

February 10, 2026 | Yu Wang | "Sonic Socialism: Radio and the Technopolitics of Listening in Maoist China" | Register

February 17, 2026 | Merlyna Lim | "Fandom, Fear, and Feeds: Affective Politics in Algorithmic Southeast Asia" | Register

March 3, 2026 | Hyemin Lee | "Bureaucratic Roots: Certificate Governmentality and Multispecies Governance in Korean Ginseng Farming" | Register

March 17, 2026 | Taomo Zhou | "Soldiers and Cellphones: The Cold War Roots of the Consumer Electronics Industry in Shenzhen, China" | Register

March 31, 2026 | Ran Zwigenberg | "Cognitive Fallout: Psychology and Early Radiation Research in Hiroshima" | RESCHEDULED TO MAY 19, 2026

April 14, 2026 | Michitake Aso | "After Agent Orange: How Dioxin Shaped Postwar Reconciliation Between the United States and Vietnam" | Register

April 21, 2026 | Gonçalo Santos | "Revisiting the Wasteocene: Shifting Circular Economies of Night-soil in Early 20th-Century China" | Register

April 28, 2026 | Hiromi Mizuno | "Nitrogen Sovereignty: A Colonial Story of Manka" | Register

May 5, 2026 | Gita Chadha | "Repurposing an Idea: Scientific Temper in India" | Register

May 19, 2026 | Ran Zwigenberg | "Cognitive Fallout: Psychology and Early Radiation Research in Hiroshima" | Register

Previous Talks

December 2 | Yi-Tang Lin | "Intermixing Repertoires: Rice Farming Techniques between Cold War East Asia and West Africa

November 25, 2025 | Sahara Ahmed | "Oral Health, Disease, and Medicine: Twentieth-Century Bengal"

November 18, 2025 | Jenna Grant | "Borderland Biologies: Malaria Control and Drug Resistance at the Edges"

November 11, 2025 | Yang Li | "From Antibiotics to Atomic Bomb: Scientific Capital and China's Cold War Rationality"

November 4, 2025 | Kuang-chi Hung | "American Forestry, Aerial Surveying, and the Remaking of Taiwan's Forests during the Cold War"

October 21, 2025 | Silvia Lindtner | "Feeling Like a State: Affect and Control in the Age of AI"

October 14, 2025 | John DiMoia | "From Occupation to Containerization, 1945 to Early 1970s"

September 30, 2025 | Aya Kimura | "Tsukemono and the Anthropocene in Your Gut: Emplacement, Awai, and the Apertures of Microbiopolitical Analysis"

September 23, 2025 | Jiaporn Laochaoroenwong | "Making Square Oxen and the Supply Chain of Fresh Meat at the Myanmar"

April 22, 2025 | Li Zhang | "Of Visceral/Somatic Practices in Healing"

April 15, 2025 | Yuriko Furuhata | "Refrigerated Time Capsules: On the Colonial Roots of Japan's Polar Science"

April 1, 2025 | Zuoyue Wang | "Chinese American Scientists: A Transnational History"

March 25, 2025 | Wen-Hua Kuo | "From Needham to STS (and Back to Needham): Why East Asian History Matters"

March 11, 2025 | Thomas DuBois | "So Much More Than Delicious: Towards a Unified Theory of Taste in Chinese Food Writing"

March 4, 2025 | Aparajita Majumdar | "Recalcitrance: Co-laboring Histories of Humans and Plants in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands"

February 25, 2025 | Monamie Haines | "Democratic Re(actors): Experiments with Being Anti-Nuclear in India"

February 11, 2025 | Dasom Lee | "Multi-level Contextual Integrity and Responsible Innovation: Embedding Social Goals into Privacy of Automated Vehicles"

December 3, 2024 | Togo Tsukahara | "Environmental History in Transnational Networks: Climate History Described by Rangaku, Dutch Navy, and Japan's Colonial Meteorology"

November 26, 2024 | Sulfikar Amir | "Living in a Hot City: Urban Heat Mitigation in Informal Settlements in Megacity Jakarta"

November 19, 2024 | Fei Huang | "Bathing through Time and Landscape: A Longue Durée History of Hot Springs in China (1000–1945)"

October 29, 2024 | Dafna Zur | "How to Talk to Martians: Socialist vs. Capitalist Science in Korean SF"

October 15, 2024 | Amit Prasad | "Contestations over Stem Cell Ethics and the US-China Tech War: What Should We Do with Their Orientalist and Colonial Framing?"

October 8, 2024 | Karine Chemla | "Historiography and History of Mathematical Symbolism: A View from Chinese Sources"

September 24, 2024 | Annapurna Mamidipudi | "Three Stories and a Proposition: Innovation Theories from Handloom Weaving in India"

September 10, 2024 | Alyssa Paredes | "Living Downstream of Yourself on the Mindanao River"

April 30, 2024 | Sharon Traweek | "Universities as Devices for Engaging Global Political Economies: Tsukuba, Sokendai, OIST, and Tohoku Universities, 1973–2023"

April 23, 2024 | Christine Luk | "Discovering Freshwater Jellyfish in Modern China: Arthur de Carle Sowerby and Craspedacusta sowerbii, 1880–1941"

April 16, 2024 | Yeonsil Kang | "Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea"

April 9, 2024 | Aaron William Moore | "Dreams from China's Past: Visions of the Future in Popular Science and Literature Magazines, 1927–1949"

March 26, 2024 | Nicole Barnes | "Racing to Be a Better Race: A Longue Durée History of China's Toilet Revolution

March 12, 2024 | Rinni Marliyana Haji Amran | "Reading Bruneian Petrofiction: How We Became Addicted to Oil"

February 27, 2024 | Amanda Lanzillo | "Muslim Artisanal Knowledge: Embodied and Textual Approaches to Technologies and Trades in Colonial India"

February 13, 2024 | Anto Mohsin | "Unpacking Indonesia's Electrification Politics"

December 5, 2023 | Junko Kitanaka | "Neurobiological Empathy: Socializing the Brain in Japanese Psychiatry"

November 28, 2023 | Eunjeong Ma | "Walking with Robots: Rehabilitation Robotics in South Korea"

November 21, 2023 | Mary Augusta Brazelton | "Making Foreign Science Credible: Academic and Professional Formation at the Lyon Sino-French Institute, 1921–1951"

November 7, 2023 | Jahnavi Phalkey | "From Circumspect Technocrat to Committed Radical: Ward Morehouse on Administering Knowledge for Development"

October 24, 2023 | Kyoungjin Bae | "Servicemen in the Frontier: Cantonese Woodworkers in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Bengal"

October 17, 2023 | Kavita Sivaramakrishnan | "Adaptable Bodies, Susceptible Biologies: Experts, Manpower, and Health Risks in India"

September 26, 2023 | Lin Zhang | "The Labor of Reinvention: Rural E-Commerce and the China Paradigm"

May 2, 2023 | Emily Baum | "From Cold War to COVID-19: Acupuncture as Soft Power in the PRC"

April 25, 2023 | Jaehwan Hyun | "Entangled Genetic Histories of Bionation Building in Japan and South Korea"

April 18, 2023 | Kate McDonald | "The Labor of Transport: Body and Machine in Japan's Postwar Consumer Society"

April 4, 2023 | Jacob Eyferth | "Agrarian Taylorism: Reorganizing the Rural Labor Process in Collective-Era China"

March 21, 2023 | David Fedman | "Dai-Ōji: The Ōji Paper Company and Japan's Pulp Pipelines in Asia"

March 14, 2023 | Farhana Sultana | "Decolonizing Climate Coloniality"

February 28, 2023 | Renny Thomas | "The Scientific-Spiritual World(s): On Science, Religion, and Rationality in India"

February 14, 2023 | Aya Homei | "The Japanese Population between Science and the State"

February 7, 2023 | Stephen Halsey | "Rocks and Gems: Mining and Developmentalism in Early Twentieth Century China"

January 31, 2023 | Nurfadzilah Yahaya | "The Baseless History of the Foreshore"

December 13, 2022 | Julia Adeney Thomas | "Frameworks for the Future: The Environment, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene"

December 6, 2022 | Lilly Irani | "Innovators and Their Others"

November 29, 2022 | Banu Subramaniam | "Botany and the Afterlives of Empire"

November 22, 2022 | Sarah Mellors Rodriguez | "Birth Control and Abortion in China"

November 15, 2022 | Youjung Shin | "Controlling the Mind for Welfare in South Korea: Classroom, Computer, and Drug, 1960s–2010s"

November 1, 2022 | Lan Li | "Sea Shells: Metaphor, Anatomy, and Epistemology of Brainlessness"

October 25, 2022 | Chia-Ling Wu | "Making Multipe Babies: The Anticipatory Governance of Assisted Reproduction in Japan and Taiwan"

October 18, 2022 | Celia Lowe | "Viral Sovereignty: Security and Mistrust in the Indonesian H5N1 Influenza Outbreak"

October 4, 2022 | Yulia Frumer | "Agency and Ethics in Japanese Robotics Engineering"

September 20, 2022 | Tamara Fernando | "Diving for Pearls: Embodied Knowledge(s) in the History of Ocean Science"

May 17, 2022 | Charu Singh | "Biography as the History of Science: Figurations of the Scientist in Colonial North India, 1915–1930"

May 3, 2022 | Faizah Zakaria | "Camphor, Celluloid, and Creating the Indigenous in the Dutch East Indes and Taiwan"

April 19, 2022 | Albert Park | "The Ecology of Authority: Agricultural Science and Destruction in Modern Korea"

April 5, 2022 | Raja Adal | "The Print Sublime: Global Scripts in the Age of Mechanical Writing"

March 22, 2022 | Yuko Fujigaki | "Lessons from Fukushima: Japanese Case Studies on Science, Technology, and Society"

March 8, 2022 | Howard Chiang | "Transcultural Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Sinophone Pacific"

February 8, 2022 | Iwo Amelung | "The Localization of Meterology and Climate Science during China's Republican Era"

January 25, 2022 | Florence Hsia | "From Illiterates to Sinologists: Indexing Chinese"

December 14, 2021 | Carla Nappi | "How to Come Apart: Decomposing a History of Translation in China"

December 7, 2021 | Jisoo Kim | "Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Korea"

November 30, 2021 | Hongong Tinn | "Manufacturing Electronics in Taiwan, 1966⁠–⁠1975: Emulation, Innovation, and Entreprenurship"

November 9, 2021 | Juno Salazar Parreñas | "Pronouns for an Apocalyptic Future"

October 26, 2021 | Victoria Lee | "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermantation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan"

October 12, 2021 | Debjani Bhattacharyya | "Insuring Weather: Climate Futures Past in the Indian Ocean World"

September 28, 2021 | Yangyang Cheng | "'Those Who Fall Behind Get Beaten Up': Can Science Build a Strong China?"

September 14, 2021 | Elizabeth Chatterjee | "The Sun's Two Faces: Solar Power in India, 1877–⁠⁠2021

May 11, 2021 | Claire Edington | "Drugs, Willpower, and the Biopolitics of Addiction in Colonial Vietnam"

May 4, 2021 | Thomas Mullaney | "The Chinese BIOS Sphere: How East Asian Computing Hacked Modernity"

April 20, 2021 | Todd Henry | "Layer Matters: Medical Authority, Body Conformity, and Intersex Livelihood in Cold War South Korea"

April 6, 2021 | Ruselle Meade | "The Kyūri-bon Boom and the Public Perception of Science in Early-Meiji Japan"

March 30, 2021 | Asif Siddiqi | "'Practically No Habitation': The Yanadi Community and the Colonial Violence of Spaceflight"

March 2, 2021 | Shellen Wu | "Mapping Science in a Global Age: The Human Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge"

February 16, 2021 | Yumi Kim | "Madness in the Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Family: Writing Away from Psychiatry"

November 4, 2019 | Projit Bihari Mukharji | "Between the Yogi and the Commissar: Imagining Decolonial Science in Postcolonial India, 1952–1977"

October 7, 2019 | Jung Lee and Hyungsub Choi | "Thinking with Technology from the History of Korea"

September 23, 2019 | Susan Burns | "Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body: Forensic Medicine, Gender, and the Courts in Modern Japan"

April 15, 2019 | Dagmar Schäfer | "Lists, Local Gazetteers, and the True Lies of Premodern China's Patterns of Social Mobility"

March 11, 2019 | Jennifer Robertson | "Digital Hormones: Emotional Humanoids and Spiritual Humans"

February 11, 2019 | Jayita Sarkar | "The First Battlefield of Western Nuclear Competition: India and Light Water Reactors, 1955–1963"

November 19, 2018 | Soyoung Suh | "Breast, Cancer, and Women in Korea, 1800–1930s"

October 15, 2018 | Suzanne Moon | "Reporting Indonesia's Green Revolution"

September 17, 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"