Research
Research Areas
Microbial Control and Sustainability
Since the late nineteenth-century discovery of microbes as causal agents of phenomena in human lives, there have accumulated rich, multifaceted historical precedents of how states and scientific experts have dealt with problems of microbial control. Twentieth-century microbial history offers a reservoir of possibility for approaching questions of sustainability in the twenty-first century, in light of the growing appreciation of microbes' role in sustaining organisms at every level of life through the microbiome, mediating climate change (especially in agriculture), and contributing to innovations in green chemistry.
History of Non-Western Science in the Modern Period
Modern scientific institutions look similar across the globe. Yet, examining them more closely reveals how disciplines function distinctively in different contexts, often bearing intellectual and cultural continuities with the premodern period, especially in the applied sciences. An exploration of the history of science in the productive crafts of agriculture and industry uncovers the significance of traditional, indigenous, and non-western knowledge in the modern world, showing the diversity and heterogeneity of paths to modernity.
Scientific Experts and the Developmental State
Scientific designs behind the commodities of everyday life, created by middling statist researchers, were one manifestation of the developmental state's changing visions of political economy in Japan and Asia in the twentieth century. Their history displays the role of scientific expertise in shaping resource management through material culture. It also demonstrates how—contrary to the rhetoric of imperial ideology—colonial frontiers served as dynamic sites of innovation and knowledge production, and not merely as sources of raw material.