HSTM Events

Fall 2026 Colloquium - James Lin

Associate Professor, Taiwan Studies Program Chair, Jackson School of International Studies, UW Washington Seattle

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 - Susan Burns

Professor, History, University of Chicago

Title: Becoming a Doctor in Early Nineteenth Century Japan: Medical Education on the Eve of Modernity

Abstract: In the 1870s, the recently established government of Japan began an aggressive campaign to institutionalize what was then known as “Western medicine.” This involved not only the establishment of modern medical schools (many staffed by European physicians) and the creation of a licensing system but also efforts to discredit Sino-Japanese medicine and its practitioners as backward and ineffective. In this talk, I want to explore the nature of medical knowledge before the intervention of the modern state by examining the education of a physician named Nanayama Jundō, who lived and worked in the far northwest of Japan. In his early 20 Nanayama traveled to Kyoto, the imperial capital and the epicenter of medical education, to study with some of the famous physicians of his day. His extant case notes, compiled at the suggestion of one of his teachers, offer a window into what he learned and how he made use of that knowledge.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - Julia Cummiskey

Johns Hopkins University

Title: Burkitt’s Lymphoma Research in Uganda (1961-1979) and the Origins of a Modern Paradigm for Global Health Science

Abstract:: In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers based at the East African Virus Research Institute in Entebbe, Uganda joined the race to discover the first human oncovirus at the same time that they navigated the transition from colonial to independent government, a reconfiguration of research funding, and an uncertain future. In this talk, I will describe how the search for a viral cause of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a newly-discovered syndrome characterized by aggressive facial tumors, shaped knowledge of viruses, cancer, and epidemiological methods while also launching a new paradigm for global health research. I argue that the EAVRI was one of the first places to become what is now called a “local partner”, a critical component of late 20th-century global health research and category that requires greater critical analysis. This talk will describe how researchers at the EAVRI leveraged their previous experience investigating yellow fever in Uganda, how they approached the “puzzle” of Burkitt’s lymphoma, and how the cancer research established patterns that shaped later HIV/AIDS research.

Bio: Julia Cummiskey is an assistant professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a BA in history from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, a masters degree in public health from Columbia University in 2007 and a PhD in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. She has taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she was the interim director of the Africana Studies program and she is now on the faculty of the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins where she also co-directs the Online Program in the History of Medicine.

Dr. Cummiskey’s research interrogates the history of global health—what it is, how it came to be, its limitations, and its potential. Her first book, Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global was published in 2024 by Ohio University Press in the series “Perspectives on Global Health”. Her current project, tentatively titled “Selling the Good Life: A History of Public Health Communication and Marketing in Uganda” explores the rise of expertise in health communication and its growing profile within the broader sector of global health.

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.

Fall 2026 Colloquium - Kate McDonald

History, UC Santa Barbara

Title: The Rickshaw in Twentieth-Century Japan: A User’s Manual

Abstract: The rickshaw was invented in Japan in 1869. Rickshaw pulling flourished as an occupation and rickshaws dominated cultural representations of Japan’s urban modernity. Though it declined in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, the rickshaw was quickly reinvented as a popular – and flexible – cultural symbol. Drawing from my current book project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Transportation, Labor, and Technology in Modern Japan, I share my favorite rickshaw stories from twentieth-century Japan. Along the way, I show how the multi-faceted history of the rickshaw raises important questions about how historians conceptualize the “user” of transportation technologies.

Bio: Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017). Her most recent work appears in The American History Review and the Journal of Asian Studies. McDonald currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies and co-editor of the monograph series Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.