Department of History and Philosophy of Science

College Fellows

Leon Rocha

Research Fellow, Emmanuel College
Affiliated Researcher, Needham Research Institute

Research interests: History of science, technology, and medicine in modern China; History of eugenics, sexology, and the reproductive sciences; Gender theory; Translation; Postcolonial studies; the life and work of Joseph Needham.

In 2010 I completed my doctoral thesis, entitled 'Sex, Eugenics, Aesthetics, Utopia in the Life and Work of Zhang Jingsheng (1888–1970)'. I was funded by a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Doctoral Studentship. From 2009 to 2010, I was Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Yale University. Before joining Emmanuel College, I was D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute. At Cambridge I teach for the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of History, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Centre for Gender Studies.

I have recently published on the Chinese translation of the word 'sex' in the early twentieth century, as well as Michel Foucault's appropriation of Sinological scholarship on ancient Chinese sexuality and Daoist alchemy. I am currently co-editing, with Robbie Duschinsky, a volume entitled Foucault, the Family, and Politics. During my tenure as Research Fellow at Emmanuel, I will finish articles on the history of book-collectors in the late Qing and early Republican China, and on Joseph Needham's relationship with a number of scholars, intellectuals, and popularisers. I also hope to complete a monograph, provisionally entitled Joseph Needham and the Networks of Sinological Knowledge, which will place the Science and Civilisation in China project in historical context.

Under preparation

  • Foucault, the Family, and Politics, co-edited with Robbie Duschinsky (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).
  • 'Introduction', co-authored with Robbie Duschinsky for Foucault, the Family, and Politics.
  • 'Foucault and Global Family Reformism, 1870–1940', co-authored with Malcolm Thompson for Foucault, the Family, and Politics.
  • '"Introduction" of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille', co-translated with Anna Kathryn Schoefert and Thibaud Harrois, for Foucault, the Family, and Politics.
  • 'The Making and Reception of Ye Dehui's Shadow of the Double Plum Tree Collection (Shuang mei jing an cong shu, 1903–1914)'.
  • 'Joseph Needham, Queen John, and the Unification Theory'.

Refereed articles

Reviews

  • Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) for Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China.
  • Angela Leung and Charlotte Furth (eds.) Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) for Journal of Asian Studies.
  • Wennan Liu, '"No Smoking" for the Nation: Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Modern China' (Unpublished thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2009) for Chinese History Dissertation Reviews.
  • Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) for Isis.
  • Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) for Metascience.
  • Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer, Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (New York: The Other Press, 2009) for Berlin Review of Books.

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