I studied for my BA in History from 2014 to 2018 at the Shandong University (Jinan, China) and completed my MA in Modern Chinese History from 2018 to 2021 at Fudan University (Shanghai, China). From 2019 to 2020, I also participated in the ‘Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities in China and the UK (MHCUK)’ programme funded by the Wellcome Trust. This dual-degree project allowed me to take part in the postgraduate programme ‘Medical Humanities’ at the Centre of History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at the University of Manchester. I was awarded MSc there in 2020. My MA & MSc research focused on modern Chinese history of science and medicine from a global context, paying special attention to Chinese history of psychiatry and mental health. My thesis dealt with western physicians’ Changing perspectives towards ‘Chinese insanity’ during the first decades of 20th century. In the meantime, I also concerned about the way Chinese physicians and intellectuals understood ‘insanity’ while facing various medical knowledge systems.
My interest in Chinese therapeutic methods for mental problems draws my attention to Chinese acupuncture. Currently, my project focuses on theoretical transformation and globalization of Chinese acupuncture in the Socialist China from 1949. Although acupuncture consisted of a marginal part in the traditional world, it is now widely considered one of the most emblematic therapies in the so-called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) system. The current popularity of Chinese acupuncture was inseparable from a series of medico-political activities by the Chinese Communist government. Informed by various disciplines, including history of politics and medicine, STS studies and medical anthropology, my research concerns about the way of how Chinese acupuncture was reinvented with modern theories, and how Chinese government and other international organizations (including the WHO) promoted globalization of this therapy.
Wan, Liang, “Confucian Orthodoxy, Classical Ideal and Professionalization: The Development of Traditional Chinese Mathematics and Astronomy in the Early and Middle Qing Dynasty (Part 1),” Chinese Classics Quarterly 6 (2018): 151-183.
Wan, Liang, “Confucian Orthodoxy, Classical Ideal and Professionalization: The Development of Traditional Chinese Mathematics and Astronomy in the Early and Middle Qing Dynasty (Part 2)”, Chinese Classics Quarterly 7 (2018): 117-132
