Contributors
Francesca Bray
is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. A historian of science, technology and medicine in China, her publications include the Agriculture volume in Joseph Needham’s series Science and Civilisation in China (1984), Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China (2007), Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China (2013) and ‘Science cultures’ (Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2018). Her current research project, Moving Crops and the Scales of History, experiments with new narratives of the global circulation of knowledge, ideas and artefacts.
Christopher Cullen
is Emeritus Director of the Needham Research Institute, and an Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. His current research interests centre on the history of astronomy and mathematics in East Asia. Recent publications include Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China: Oxford University Press, 2017 – a narrative history of the foundational period of Chinese astronomy, third century BCE to third century CE, and The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning: Three Ancient Chinese Astronomical Systems: Routledge, 2017 – with translations of source materials, and detailed explanations.
Asaf Goldschmidt
is Professor of East Asian Studies and Director of the Confucius Institute at Tel Aviv University. His main research interest is the history of Chinese medicine and science. He published the Evolution of Medicine in China: The Song Dynasty, 960-1200 (Routledge, 2008) as part of the Needham Research Institution Series. His second book, Medical Practice in Song-Dynasty China: The Case Histories of Xu Shuwei (1080-1154), a full translation of Xu Shuwei’s 90 cases on Cold Damage disorders along with lengthy introduction, was accepted for publication by Springer.
Li Cho-ying
is Associate Professor of Institute of History at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. With research interests ranging from environmental history to historiography, Li has published a number of articles in renowned journals including Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, T’oung Pao, and Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. He was offered Zhu Kezhen Award in 2011 by the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. He has also served on the editorial boards of several academic journals.
Lim Jongtae
teaches the history of science in East Asia at Seoul National University, Korea. He has conducted research on early modern Korean science, particularly the history of Western learning and the scientific exchange between China and Korea. His publications include Allegories of a Round Earth and the Five Continents: Western Geographical Knowledge in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century China and Korea (P’aju: Ch’angbi, 2012), “Journeys of the Modest Astronomers: Korean Astronomers’ Missions to Beijing in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident 36(2014), 81-108.
Peter Lorge
is Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in tenth- and eleventh-century Chinese history, with particular interest in the interaction between war, politics, and culture. He has written four books, covering the history of martial arts, guns and gunpowder, and, most recently, The Reunification of China (2015), an account of the founding of the Song dynasty.
Moon Joong-Yang
is Professor at the Department of Korean History, Seoul National University. He received his PhD degree from the same university with dissertation on the history of agriculture in premodern Korea. His recent research focuses on the relationship between Korean traditional science and western science in late Chosŏn Dynasty period. He is also interested in the modernization of East Asian traditional science and the comparative history of science in East Asia.
Park Kwon Soo
is professor at Chungbuk National University, Korea. He has conducted research on the history of astronomy and cosmology in pre-modern Korea. He recently focuses his research on what might be called the “pseudo-sciences,” such as fortune-telling, geomancy, and the Yijing numerology, and the Royal Bureau of Astronomy of the Chosŏn dynasty as one of the main institutional bases of those fields. He is currently writing a monograph on the history of numerological techniques in Korea.
Shin Dongwon
is professor at Chonbuk National University, Korea. His research examines the history of Korean medicine, focusing on the issues of culture, power, and identity. Since 2010, he has been undertaking the “Science and Civilization in Korea” Project, the aim of which is to publish a series of monographs on the history of Korean science, technology, and medicine, both in Korean and in English. His recent publication includes Donguibogam and the History of Medicine in East Asia (Seoul: Deulnyeok, 2015), History of Everyday Life in Medicine in Korea (Seoul: Deulnyeok, 2014).
Pierre-Étienne Will
is professor emeritus at Collège de France (1992-2014), and Directeur d’études at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has published Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford, 1990; in French, Paris, 1980; translated into Korean and Chinese), Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850 (Ann Arbor, 1991, with R. Bin Wong), China, Democracy, and Law: A Historical and Contemporary Approach (Leiden, 2012, with Mireille Delmas-Marty; in French, Paris, 2007), and articles on Chinese economy, society, politics, bureaucracy, law, water management, and more.