He Bian
He Bian (Ch. ??) is a historian of late imperial and a historian of science. She got her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 2014. Her research interests span many topics pertaining to the question of authority and variation in China’s traditional culture, particularly in medicine and the natural sciences, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Overall, her passion lies in writing a new kind of Chinese cultural history that foregrounds knowledge of all kinds, and is also rigorously contextualized by institutional, social, and economic conditions of the day.
Professor Bian's first book, Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Early Modern Culture in China, 1500-1800 (link is external)came out from Princeton University Press in Spring 2020. An interview with the New Books Network can be found here.(link is external)
She is at work on her second book project, The Formula of Happiness: A Social History of Medical Recipes in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. In academic year 2020-21, she is on leave researching this book project as a Henry Luce Foundation / ACLS Early Career Fellow, with additional funding from the National Endowment for Humanities. She is also writing a co-authored book on Manchu plant and animal names with Dr. Mårten Söderblom Saarela at Academia Sinica.
At Princeton, Professor Bian teaches introductory courses to Modern East Asia (HIS 208) and Early Modern China (HIS 324), an upper-level seminar on Medicine and Society in China (HIS 472), and a range of graduate seminars. She advises undergraduate and graduate students on topics related to Ming-Qing history, East Asian science, technology and medicine, and Manchu Studies. She has been recently elected President of the Manchu Studies Group(link is external)
Source: Princeton University
Books by Author
Videos
