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Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang
Kevin Chang, a historian of science and medicine in early modern Europe, received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 2002. Since then he has been on the faculty of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, and has been Associate Research Fellow/Associate Professor since 2008. The areas of his research include 17th- and 18th-century life and material sciences, early modern alchemy, history of vitalism, and cultural history of academia. He is particularly interested in early modern matter theory, medical thought, and natural philosophy, oral and textual culture, authorship, academic degrees, and the institutions of scientific publication. He has been increasingly working on subjects of comparative or transcontinental intellectual and cultural history |
| Current Research |
- A book project on the transformation of the dissertation as a genre of academic writing and publication in early modern Europe
- A sequel project that traces the different paths of dissemination of the German model of Ph.D. and its requirements across Europe, to the previous colonies of European powers, and to East Asia
- A book project that analyzes the chemico-medical teachings of Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734) in the reshaping of traditional conception of life that gave rise to 18th-century vitalism
- Case studies on early modern alchemy
- Case studies on the encounters of Western and East Asian thoughts and institutions, such as the discussions on the virtues and vices of the Chinese civil examination system in 18th and 19th-century Europe, the intersections of Western and East Asian philology and linguistics in the 20th-century, and the appropriation of European vitalism in Republican China
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| Publications |
- "Stahl, Georg Ernst," New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, editor-in-chief Noretta Koertge, 6: 504-08 (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007).
- "Georg Ernst Stahl's Alchemical Publications: Anachronism, Reading Market, and a Scientific Lineage Redefined," New Narratives in Eighteenth Century Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 23-43.
- "Toleration of Alchemists as Political Question: Transmutation, Disputation, and Early Modern Scholarship on Alchemy," Ambix, 54 (2007): 245-273.
- "Georg Ernst Stahl," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition (World Wide Web edition), 2007 (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-261656).
- "From Vitalistic Cosmos to Materialistic World: The Lineage of Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl and the Shift of Early Modern Chymical Cosmology," Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007), 215-225.
- "Kant's Disputation of 1770: The Dissertation and the Communication of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe," Endeavour, 31 (2007): 45-49.
- "From Oral Disputation to Written Text: The Transformation of the Dissertation in Early Modern Europe," History of Universities, 19 (2004): 129-87.
- "Motus Tonicus: Georg Ernst Stahl's Formulation of Tonic Motion and Early Modern Medical Thought," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78 (2004): 767-803.
- "Fermentation, Phlogiston, and Matter Theory: Chemistry and Natural Philosophy in Georg Ernst Stahl's Zymotechnia Fundamentalis," Early Science and Medicine, 7 (2002): 31-64.
- "The 'Artists of Fire' and the Dennis I. Duveen Collection," Messenger Magazine, Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, 36 (1998): 23-24.
- "Theoretical Study of the Neutral and Ionic States of Hypermetalated Potassium Compounds K2OH and K2NH2 and Potassium Complexes KH2O and KNH3," co-authored with Y.-W Hsiao and T.-M. Su, Chemical Physics 162 (1992): 335-348.
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