Qing Bodies: Exercises in Style

This project explores early modern Chinese relationships with borderland and minority medical and scientific cultures in an attempt to understand how the history and modern study of Chinese materia medica is shaped by the continuing reverberations of Chinese imperial expansion from ca. 1300-1800. It is simultaneously an examination of multilingualism in early modern Chinese  science and medicine. On another level, this project localizes my wrestling with the problem of understanding what I call the “translated object” in history: I’m trying to understand the ontology of translated objecthood in terms of assemblages and dialogic practices.

This project grew naturally out of my first book project, The Monkey and the Inkpot  (Harvard, 2009), which you can find a brief description of here.

For more on this evolving project, click here.