China Studies Centre, the University of Sydney
Time: 12:30 – 2:00pm, Thursday 27th June 2019
Location: Seminar Room 350, Carslaw Building, the University of Sydney
Registration: http://bit.ly/ChenHaoSeminar
In this seminar Dr Chen Hao will talk about his book project on the formation of a discipline named Chinese medical history in the early half of twentieth century. This research examines the emergence of a dramatic shift in thinking about the history of medicine in countries around the world, including critical scrutiny of what has long been called “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, as well as Chen’s new research interest in how influential medical experts interacted over time and space. While focusing on historians during the early Republican era China, Chen also explores changes happening in Germany, Japan, Britain, the United States, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. This talk particularly traces the work of historians in the German-speaking world, the spread of their thinking to other Western countries, to Japan, and finally to China. This research proposes new ways of understanding the interaction between knowledge and historiography in the early half of 20th century in a global context. In particular, the talk reveals how a historiography which both embraced world trends and historians with transnational backgrounds simultaneously created new national boundaries and provoked nationalism, consciously or unconsciously. Chen argues this complex understanding should feature in historiography research and other human sciences in a “globalised’ world where isolationism and nationalism remain ever present.
Speaker
Dr Hao Chen is Assistant Professor at School of History, Renmin University of China. Hao Chen was educated at Peking University (AB, 2005. PhD, 2011), and has taught in the Department of History at Renmin University of China, since 2011. His research and teaching is centred on the medical and cultural history of ancient China, especially 6th-13th century, with special interest in medical expertise and identity figuration, healing and belief, divination and astrology, bodily sensations and expressions, materiality, textuality and reading practices of Chinese manuscript culture and early printed books, emotions, memory and trauma narratives. In the last five years, Hao has started to work on the “modern” historiography of ancient or “traditional” medicine and related knowledge in Republican China, from a trans-national or global perspective.