Publications

Books

Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato (co-authored with Carrie Jenkins) (McGill Queens University Press, 2020).
Metagestures (co-authored with Dominic Pettman) (Punctum Press, 2019).
The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Projects in Progress

As of summer 2022, I’m actively drafting material for the following projects, and am happy to offer talks or seminar discussions on work in progress from them.

The Elizabeths: Elemental History (I’m trying to bang out a sh!@#y first draft of the manuscript in summer 2022, and please forgive my hermitty tendencies while I do this. This is an experimental, adisciplinary book about time, storytelling, embodied history, mourning, and the historian’s craft. It incorporates short fiction inspired by historical documents collected in early modern medical/astrological casebooks, recipes on storytelling craft from the Time Kitchen, little essays on historical methodology and practice, notes on the arts of decomposition, and a mourning diary.)

Wormholes (I am drafting stories for first book in this project, focusing on materials in the Burgoa Library in Oaxaca, and paired w/ Dianna Frid’s photography. While we work on a project website, you can find Dianna’s brief account of the early days of the project on her personal site.)

Insomniac History (This is a little book on time, sleep, and their translations in Manchu literature and history. It is part of a triptych of little books on translation, history, and Manchu studies that’s tentatively titled History in Translation: A Triptych. This book will be followed by Prepositional History and Remixing History, if all goes according to plan, but the project might metamorphose as I work on it. Stay tuned…)

Articles, Essays, and Book Chapters

“Full. Empty. Stop. Go.: Translating Miscellany in Early Modern China.” In Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 4^th edition (Routledge, 2021): 453-465.
Markbooks (Flugschriften, 2021).
“Information in Early Modern East Asia” (with Devin Fitzgerald). In Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Geonig, and Anthony Grafton, eds., Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2021): 38-60.
“A Historian’s Tarot.” Portable Gray 2, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 159-172.
“The Sound of Shaking Paper: A Sonic Archive.” In Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, Vol. 1, Flugschriften 2019.
“Sappho Questions Medusa.” Geist 111 (Winter 2018): 42-46.
“Reading Needham Now” (with McKenzie Wark). Isis 110.1 (March 2019): 100-108.
“Hide and Seek.” History and Theory 56 (January 2019): S6-S8.
“Following Ghosts: Skinning Science in Early Modern Eurasia.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018): 367-372.
“Reimagining Symposium” (with Carrie Jenkins). The Philosophers’ Magazine 82 (Third Quarter 2018): 48-57.
“Imagining History/Writing Late Imperial China.” Late Imperial China 39.1 (June 2018): 7-15.
“Metamorphoses: Fictioning and the Historian’s Craft.” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 160-165.
“Paying Attention: Early Modern Science Beyond Genealogy.” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 459-470.
“The Elizabeths.” Public Domain Review (April 2017).
“Science, Technology, and Medicine.” In Michael Szonyi, ed. A Companion to Chinese History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017): 265-276.
“Making ‘Mongolian’ Nature: Medicinal Plants and Qing Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Calahan, and Anatole Tchikine, eds., The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University Press, 2017): 337-347.
“trees and stones are only what they are: Translating Ming Empire in the Fifteenth Century.” In Craig Clunas, Jessica Harrison-Hall, and Luk Yu-ping, eds., Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400-1450 (British Museum Press, 2016): 206-210.
“A Page at the Orchestra.” In Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman, eds., What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History (De Gruyter, 2016): 221-227.
“Translating Science” (with Marwa Elshakry). In Bernard Lightman, ed., A Companion to History of Science (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016): 372-386.
“Tilting Toward the Light: Translating the Medieval World on the Ming Mongolian Frontier.” The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2015): 157-178.
“Maggots, Jawbones, and a Multilingual Archive of Decay.” Endeavour 38 (2014): 55-57.
“Recycling History.” Tang Studies 31 (2013): 161-176.
“The Global and Beyond: Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science.” Isis 104.1(March 2013): 102-110.
“Surface Tension: Objectifying Ginseng in Chinese Early Modernity.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2013): 31-52.
“Disengaging from ‘Asia’.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 6.2 (2012): 1-4.
“On Yeti and Being Just: Carving the Borders of Humanity in Early Modern China.” In Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, eds. Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies (Columbia University Press, 2012): 55-78.
“Winter Worm, Summer Grass: Cordyceps, Colonial Chinese Medicine, and the Formation of Historical Objects.” In Anne Digby, Waltraud Ernst and Projit Bihari Mukharji, eds., Crossing Colonial Historiographies (Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 21-36.
“VITA: Li Shizhen.” Harvard Magazine (January-February 2010).
“Bolatu’s Pharmacy: Theriac in Early Modern China.” Early Science and Medicine 14.6 (2009): 737-764.
“Body Language: An Imagined Anatomy.” Corona 5 (Winter 2009).
“Li Shizhen.” Berkshire Encyclopedia of China (Berkshire Publishing, 2009): 462-466.
“Compendium of Materia Medica.” Berkshire Encyclopedia of China (Berkshire Publishing, 2009): 1321-1322.
“A Bug’s Life: Change and Metamorphosis in Early Modern China.” Endeavour 31.4 (December 2007): 124-128.

Book Reviews

**Please note: during my years as a podcast host for the New Books Network I did not accept invitations to write single-book reviews.**

Linda Barnes, Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Harvard University Press, 2005) in East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 37 (2013/2014): 101-103.
Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in Science 337.6090 (6 July 2012): 36.
Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2010) in Renaissance Quarterly 64.3 (Fall 2011): 938-939.
Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge University Press, 2010) in Renaissance Quarterly 63.3 (Fall 2010): 884-885.
Mei Zhan, Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames (Duke University Press, 2009) in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2011): 199-200.
Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007) in Annals of Science 66.4 (2009): 566-568.

Work published in web-based journals or academic blog sites

“The Gesture of Photographing” (with Dominic Pettman). thresholds 1 (2017).
“Small-Gauge Cities?” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 3 (07 July 2016).
“Small-Gauge Storytelling.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 3 (20 June 2016).
“Translating Qing Recipes,” a series of experiments using translating-as-reading to explore the narrative structures and possibilities of Qing-era Manchu medical recipes. Ongoing series on academic blog The Recipes Project http://recipes.hypotheses.org/ :

Other web-based publications

The Uninvited Project (with Carrie Jenkins) (2020- )
The Invisible College (w/ Carrie Jenkins since 2018), co-running the site and posting new material, including:
- Welcome to the Invisible College (a video conversation, August 2018)
- Doors (an essay, Aug 2018)
- Worktime (a text conversation, 2018)
- Halloween (a video conversation, 2019)
- Beginnings (an essay, 2018)
- Housekeeping (short pieces, May 2019)

“The Elizabeths” (last updated 2018)
“Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm” (July 2015)
“The One Who Claws at His Names”
“KUNGGUR kangar!: A landscape of Manchu onomatopoeias”
“The Historian and the Etymologist: An Experimental Twitter Essay”

Podcast Interviews

Between 2011-2018, I conducted and published nearly 400 podcast interviews as host for the New Books Network. You can find them linked below, organized into rough categories and alphabetically by author name.

On cultural, critical, and literary theory and philosophy