Historian & Author
Science and technology
have shaped modern China.
As a historian and professor, I study how.
I examine the politics and experience of technology from below, through locales outside coastal cities and individuals outside the national elite. I explain how the history of science is far more than a list of names, dates, and inventions. Instead, it is little less than a history of the modern world; why we think the way we think, believe what we believe, and construct our societies the way they are constructed.
I am the author of Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society, which will be published in early 2024 by Stanford University Press. A critical history of news in the twentieth century, it offers a fresh perspective on how technology and politics interact to create modern societies, reinterpreting the rise of mass politics through the lens of everyday communication techniques and behaviors.
Seeking News, Making China
Our generation is not unique. Interlocked crises of news, technology, and politics have occurred many times in the past. How do people experience profound changes in information systems and political organization? What is it like to live through a news revolution? And what lessons can be drawn for the future?
Research
In addition to my work on information technology, I am also working on a history of science, exploration, and empire in nineteenth-century China. The book focuses on the amateur mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Huang Maocai (1843-1890), who led modern China’s first expedition to India. I am also interested in intellectual history, developing a project on the global origins of “the spirit of science” 科学精神, a nineteenth-century European concept that dominates contemporary China.
Teaching
At Peking University, China’s oldest institution of higher learning, I teach two foundational seminars: The Global History & Philosophy of Science, and The History of Science, Technology & Medicine in China, 1550-Present. I also offer an advanced reading seminar on communications history, along with a historical methods course and research tutorials.
About Me
I am a historian of information, technology, and politics in modern China, currently an Assistant Professor in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Department at Peking University in Beijing. I joined the department in 2020. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, I received my PhD from the History Department at Princeton University.