Department of History presents "American Qi (?): Chinese Medicine in Music City, USA"
Eminent Scholar Lecture with Ruth Rogaski
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Gallery
Date & Time
September 11, 2025, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Description
Professor Jinghong Zhang, Assistant Professor in the Department of History presents an Eminent Scholar Lecture:
American Qi (?): Chinese Medicine in Music City, USA
Ruth Rogaski, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
The talk will focus on Ruth Rogaski's most recent project: an ethnography of how people in the American South turn to acupuncture to ease pain, fight addiction, and find community. The project seeks to understand how people in an “American heartland”—a place known as the center of evangelical Christianity and the capital of country music—make sense of Chinese medicine’s practices and philosophies.
Ruth Rogaski specializes in the history of science, medicine, and the environment in China. She is the author of Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004), which traces how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese studies, the Welch Medal in the history of medicine, and was co-recipient of the Berkshire Prize. She is also the author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which explores how diverse observers created knowledge about northeast Asia’s multiple environments from the seventeenth century to the present. Knowing Manchuria was awarded the George Perkins Marsh Prize in environmental history by the American Society for Environmental History and the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize in the history of the life sciences and natural history by the History of Science Society.
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