HSTM Events

HMED Lunchtime Lecture Series - Marta Hanson

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Research Associate at CAS-E (Center for Advanced Studies-Erlangen, Germany)

Title: "Knowing Hands: Hand-memory Techniques and Handy Knowledge in late-Ming (1368-1644) Daily-use Encyclopedias"

Abstract: The concept “Knowing hands” captures how pre-modern people used their hands in distinctly different ways: to think through things, such as macro-microcosm relationships, to think with, as in cognitive processing through “hand-memory techniques,” and to do things mindfully with “handy knowledge,” such as pulse taking, needling, massage, and ritual healing in medicine. This research lecture will cover the latter two dimensions of “knowing hands” specified in the subtitle; 1) hand-memory techniques – how humans use hands to aid their cognitive processing – and 2) handy knowledge – what knowledge is grasped corporeally and conceptually with hands and so considered “handy” enough to be embodied.

To illustrate this two-part distinction, this lecture uses a range of examples from daily-use encyclopedias that began to be published in China from 1599 on to spread pragmatic knowledge to a wide audience spanning the “four occupations/peoples” (simen 四民): scholar-gentry and government officials (shi 士), Peasant farmers (nong 農), artisans and craftsmen (gong 工), and merchants and traders (shang 商). Hand-based knowledge became newly significant in this new genre of 17th-century daily-use encyclopedias as a means to attract a wider readership.

Readers in turn had a new textual source for wide-ranging bodily practices where they could learn not only how to play music, do martial arts, and launch an arrow but also how to use their hands to calculate easily in the marketplace and also to divine quickly their immediate futures.

Divination Engines: A Talk with Xiaochang Li

Abstract: How and why did artificial intelligence--a field that was committed for so long to the explicit, formal representation of human perception, reason, and expertise--become narrowly redefined as a practice of large-scale statistical pattern recognition, one that prioritized effective prediction over explanatory power? One answer lies in the strange and enduring quest to endow machines with the capacity for language.

This talk draws from the new book, Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press 2026), which traces the long history speech and natural language processing from telephony to text mining and examines the far-reaching consequences of opening language to statistical interpretation.

Bio: Xiaochang Li is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and affiliate faculty in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - Sangwoon Yoo

Hanbat National University, South Korea and Charles Babbage Institute

Title: Making East Asian Semiconductors in Cold War America: Migration, Knowledge Labor, and the Rise of MOS Technology

Abstract: How did East Asia emerge as the center of global semiconductor manufacturing despite the industry’s technological origins in the United States? Conventional explanations emphasize developmental states, industrial policy, technology transfer, or manufacturing labor within East Asia. This talk instead looks inside the American research system during the Cold War.

Focusing on metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) technology, I trace East Asian scientists and engineers who studied and worked in American universities and corporate laboratories before becoming important intermediaries in the semiconductor industries of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Their careers show that East Asian engineers were not simply recipients of American technology but participated directly in producing foundational semiconductor knowledge within the U.S. military-industrial-academic complex.

I argue that the familiar geographical division of labor between American innovation and East Asian manufacturing was preceded by, and developed alongside, an earlier division of knowledge labor within American research institutions themselves. Rather than treating “American invention” as a unified national achievement, this talk looks inside the production of that invention, focusing on forms of research labor that were essential yet often difficult to see in conventional accounts.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - Jennifer Alexander

Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and in the Program for History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota

Title: Channeling the divine? Technology and the cultural chasm between evangelical/conservative and liberal Christianity

Abstract: With AI we have “slipped into the language and habits of mind we normally reserve for deities,” wrote NYT reporter Joseph Bernstein Society turning technologies into gods is not new; it happened with the telegraph long before AI. This talk draws from my book manuscript Two Worlds, One God, and shows how the history of the relationship between technology and religion can contribute to current assessments of technological power. It examines the historical role of technology in the international and often acrimonious religious divide between liberal/mainline and conservative Protestants that developed after the Second World War. Read more.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - James Lin

School of International Studies, University of Washington

Title: In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan

Abstract: In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts took the country’s agrarian success and exported it throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia.

Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions were portrayed in Taiwan as proof of the Republic of China’s modernity and were crucial to how the ruling government sought to hold onto its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home. This talk will draw primarily upon chapters 3 and 7 of the book, exploring the history of agricultural science and technology in Taiwan and abroad, and their co-construction with authoritarianism, military power, and Cold War politics.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - Marion Quirici

Kennesaw State University

Title: “Degeneration Theory and Disability Panic in Early Irish Sports Journalism”

Abstract: This talk explores the central significance of degeneration theory, an idea propagated by nineteenth-century psychiatrists and criminologists suggesting the human race was in evolutionary decline, in the early sports journalism of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Founded by athlete and newspaperman Michael Cusack in the 1880s, the GAA aimed to revive native Irish sports and pastimes, such as hurling and Gaelic football, and to diminish the influence of foreign games. The Association had a profound and lasting impact on the project of the Irish Revival, not least because its production of athletes and ideals of athleticism proved useful for the recruitment of soldiers into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The GAA maintained a print culture that has been largely overlooked, including Cusack’s own Celtic Times newspaper, the Gaelic Athletic Annual journal, and a number of books.

My archival research examines the organization’s journalism and promotional literature to trace the GAA’s roots in fears of racial degeneration, and to expose its articulation of a eugenic body politic. GAA nationalists made a conscious effort to invert stereotypes of Irish weakness, unruliness, drunkenness, laziness, and uncleanliness with a specific code of conduct for Irish men, and to a lesser extent, Irish women. They imagined their task—building up the nation’s “inherited manliness”—to be a matter of racial preservation. The degeneration paranoia endemic to Irish nationalism influenced not only the creative responses of modernist authors, but also the biopolitical regime in Ireland after independence.

Marion Quirici is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies and Global Anglophone Literature at Kennesaw State University, and the author of Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing, published in 2026 with Syracuse University Press. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, BMJ's Medical Humanities, The Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine, Éire-Ireland, and the Joyce Studies Annual.