Staff profile

My work combines methods from media history, book history, and the history of science to address fundamental problems in the global history of knowledge. Research to date has centered on the construction of "communicability," in particular tracing the transformation of print networks between Japan and western Europe, ca. 1750-1900, as outlined in my contribution to the New Cambridge History of Japan. I have also edited numerous special issues and thematic sections of major journals concerning topics such as the temporality of knowledge production, intersensoriality and gender in science, and the emergence of concepts of 'modern science' in East Asia. Articles on other topics -- including the social science of matchmaking, scientific 'popularization' in a global context, breast cancer surgery in early modern Japan, and the racialization of print capitalism -- have appeared in journals such as Isis, Osiris, PMLA, and the Journal of Social History. My two main projects at present concern the history of AI and "information society" in Japan, and the global history of "fringe" science through the lens of "thoughtography." The former is linked to a long-term collaboration with Yasuhiro Okazawa of Kyoto University concerning televisual technologies and media theory, about which you can find more here and here (latter in Japanese).

I earned my BA from Yale and PhD from Harvard. Prior to my arrival at Durham, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Music and Media Studies at Humboldt University (Berlin). My research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, the Suntory Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the DNP Foundation.

I welcome inquiries regarding postgraduate studies related to the history of science, technology, and medicine broadly writ, as well as media studies projects that have a strong bearing on those fields. 

• history of science
• global history
• history of the book
• media studies
• history of medicine
• history of technology

• 2000: Senior Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography: Chair of Selection Committee; Member of Diversity & Outreach Committee

Book review

• Hsiung, H. (2024). Stephen Robertson. B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data. x + 161 pp., illus., bibl., indexes. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2020. £18.95 (paper); ISBN 9781800640290. Cloth and e-book available. Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 115(2), 430-431. https://doi.org/10.1086/730238
• Hsiung, H. (2021). Review of Technical Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 53(1-2), 156-161. https://doi.org/10.1163/26669323-53010013
• Hsiung, H. (2021). Review of Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age. Medical History, 65(3), 307-309. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2021.21
• Hsiung, H. (2021). Review of Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan. Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 112(2), https://doi.org/10.1086/714673
• Hsiung, H. (2016). Review of The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. Canadian Journal of History, 51(3), https://doi.org/10.3138/cjh.ach.51.3.rev12

Chapter in book

• Hsiung, H. (2023). The Problem of Western Knowledge in Late Tokugawa Japan. In The New Cambridge History of Japan. Volume II: Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World, c. 1580-1877 (363-396). Cambridge University Press
• Hsiung, H. (2021). Daigaku nankō, Kaisei gakkō. In A. Toshiyuki, R. Kaibara, N. Kutsuzawa, K. Satō, I. Van Daalen, & F. Matsukata (Eds.), Yōgakushi kenkyū jiten (180-181). Shibunkaku shuppan
• Hsiung, H., & Schwartz, K. A. (2021). Lithography. In A. Grafton, A.-S. Goeing, A. Blair, & P. Duguid (Eds.), Information: A Historical Companion (583-88). Princeton University Press
• Hsiung, H. (2018). Chi no rekishigaku to kindai sekai no tanjō [Histories of Knowledge and the Birth of the Modern World]. In K. Namikawa, & S. Furuie (Eds.), = Edo-Meiji renzoku suru rekishi (52-67). Fujiwara shoten
• Hsiung, H. (2017). The Circle of Knowledge: Radical Commensurability and the Deaf Textbook. In A. Rogers, P. Mukhopadhyay, & R. Kunstmann (Eds.), The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (161-187). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_7

Journal Article

• Hsiung, H. (2024). Racializing Print Capitalism in the Transimperial Pacific: “The Printers Fear the Invasion of the Yellow Peril”. Journal of Social History, 58(2), 265-290. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae040
• Hsiung, H. (2024). Television and the Origins of Visual Pattern Recognition AI in Japan: a ‘Quest for a Seeing Machine’. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 11(1-2), 3-31. https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-bja10054
• Hsiung, H., Montero, E., & Serrano, E. (2024). Introduction: The Stormy Swirl of Sensations. Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 39(2), 259-74. https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10107
• Hsiung, H. (2024). The Gentleman, the Detective, and the Housewife: Sensory Worlds of Experiment in Japanese Thoughtography, 1910–1911. Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 39(2), 390-416. https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10083
• Hsiung, H. (2023). Ōbei kara mita Yōgakushi kenkyū: arata na mondai ishiki to kokusai renkei no kanōsei [A Euro-American Perspective on Yōgaku Historiography: Challenges to Global History and Possibilities for International Collaboration]
• Hsiung, H., Lenel, L., & Meister, A.-M. (2023). Introduction: Entangled Temporalities. Journal for the History of Knowledge, 4, 9-32. https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.17017
• Hsiung, H. (2023). Complete, Accessible, Now: What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Research Library. Journal for the History of Knowledge, 4, https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.12409
• Hsiung, H. (2022). ’Use Me As Your Test!’: Patients, Practitioners, and the Commensurability of Virtue. Osiris, 37, 273-296. https://doi.org/10.1086/719230
• Hsiung, H., & Serrano, E. (2021). Introduction: Epistemologies of the Match. https://doi.org/10.1086/716882
• Hsiung, H. (2021). From Harmony to E-Harmony: Fourier, Social Science, and the Management of Love. Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 112(4), 786-794. https://doi.org/10.1086/716883
• Hsiung, H. (2021). Épistémologie à la japonaise: Kanamori Osamu and the history and philosophy of science in Japan. Contemporary Japan, 33(1), 123-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2020.1847390
• Hsiung, H. (2019). Whose Science Wins or Loses? (And What's Left for Reason After?). Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 110(4), 770-774. https://doi.org/10.1086/706532
• Hsiung, H. (2019). Knowledge Made Cheap: Global Learners and the Logistics of Reading. PMLA, 134(1), 137-143. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.1.137
• Hsiung, H. (2012). Woman, Man, Abacus: A Tale of Enlightenment. Harvard journal of Asiatic studies, 72(1), 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1353/jas.2012.0007

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Hsiung, H. (2021). Japan’s love affair with the fax machine – a strange relic of technological fantasies

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Hsiung, H. (2024). Timing the textbook: capitalism, development, and western knowledge in the nineteenth-century
• Hsiung, H., Frampton, S. A., Hepler-Smith, E., & Robertson, C. (2017). Virtual Roundtable on “Compression”