The project combines cultural and social history methods with analysis of material objects like clocks, sundials, and calendars. My dissertation examines the social networks of artisans and scholars, the market for communicating time, cultures of precision, the management of everyday life, and the myriad ways in which these instruments and tools placed the Qing dynasty within a unique and underrepresented position in the global history of science.

Drawing upon a wide array of archeological artifacts, museum objects, and textual sources, the project explored how fish complemented pastoralism in the northern and eastern steppe during the Mongol Empire and how the culture of the north impacted other interactions and regions of the Mongol territories.

The Qing banquet project was a collaborative reading and research group led by Daniel Greenberg at the University of Minnesota and Miranda Brown at the University of Michigan. Using travel records, administrative regulations, paintings, objects, archival documents, and secondary research, the group tried to examine how banquets operated and changed during the eighteenth century and how banquets combined Manchu and Chinese foods and practices.

In Chinese medicine, the wuzang or the five primary organs and the liufu or the six secondary organs refer to: the heart, the liver, the spleen, the lungs, the kidneys, the gallbladder, the stomach, the large intestine, the small intestine, the urinary bladder, and the sanjiao. But where is the brain? This project investigated the status of the brain in Chinese medicine. It not only examined what kinds of terms medical professionals used to refer to the brain, but also how medical encounters introduced new ideas for understanding cognition and psychology.

This project studied the Japanese Fairy Tale series and the production of crepe paper books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using archival records, special collections, and book historical methods, this project examined how the crepe-paper books were manufactured, designed, and the circulated among the craze for global children’s literature. The project studied the entanglements of imperialism through the study of material books.