Dr Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira

I joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science as a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2024, and in May 2025, I continued at HPS under a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. Prior to Cambridge, I worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for the Social History of Health & Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, for the Wellcome-Trust funded project ‘Building Shared Futures: Co-developing Medical Humanities in China and the UK’.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in History from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, a master’s degree in Chinese History from Fudan University, China, and a PhD in History from UCL. My Wellcome Trust-funded PhD – awarded in 2023 with no revisions – won the Royal Asiatic Society Bayly Prize in Asian Studies, the British Association for Chinese Studies Best Doctoral Thesis Award, and the IUHPST Dissertation Prize of the Division of History of Science and Technology.

I am a global historian specialising in the intersections of science, medicine, and religion in 19th- and 20th-century China, with extended interests in the histories of psychology, mental health, and alternative therapies in modern East Asia and South America.

My first edited volume, Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2025. In 2024, I received a generous USD 60,000 award from the D. Kim Foundation to support the completion of my first monograph, currently under review with Cambridge University Press. Titled The Science of the Spirit: Mind, Medicine, and the Impossible in Chinese Modernity, it explores the Chinese enthusiasm for mental powers and their impact on notions of health and religious experience in early 20th-century China. Contrary to the expectation that the introduction of modern science would create a world devoid of spiritual meaning, my book demonstrates that the mind sciences instead sparked renewed interest among educated Chinese elites in spiritual, traditional, and occult knowledge and practices.

I am an Associate Fellow of The Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society, and a Research Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. To find out more about my work, please visit my personal website.

Publications

Books and Edited Volumes

The Science of the Spirit: Mind, Medicine, and the Impossible in Chinese Modernity. Under review with Cambridge University Press ('Science in History' book series)

Therapy, Spirituality and East Asian Imaginaries [co-edited with Ioannis Gaitanidis, Avery Morrow, and Han Sang-yun] (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025).

Select Journals and Book Chapters

‘Door Amulets’, in Adam Y. Chau, ed., Chinese Religious Culture in 100 Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

‘Disembodied Spirits or Mental Suggestion? Psychical Research and the Redefinition of Superstition in Republican China’, in Emily Baum and Albert Wu, eds., Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2026).

‘From Eden to Aquarius: Oriental Medicine, Natural Healing and the Market of Self-Care Books in Brazil in the 1970s’ [with Renata P. Sigolo], in Ioannis Gaitanidis, Luis F. B. Junqueira, Avery Morrow and Han Sang-yun, eds., Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025).

‘Medicine in Chinese History’, in Routledge Research Encyclopedia of Chinese Studies, edited by Chris Shei and Sui He (London: Routledge, 2024).

‘The Power Within: Mass Media, Scientific Entertainment, and the Introduction of Psychical Research into China, 1900–1920’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 59, no. 2 (2023): 193–216. [Winner of the ‘2021 John C. Burnham Early Career Award’, conferred by the Forum for History of Human Science and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences]

‘Numinous Herbs: Stars, Spirits, and Medicinal Plants in Late Imperial China’, in Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2022), 456–472.

‘What Not to Eat, How Not to Treat: Medical Prohibitions’ [with Vivienne Lo], in Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2022), 303–319.

‘Entre Agulhas e Mãos: Contracultura e a popularização da medicina chinesa no brasil na década de 1970’ (Needles and Hands: Counterculture and the Popularisation of Chinese Medicine in Brazil in the 1970s)’ [with Renata P. Sigolo], Locus 27, no. 1 (2021): 122–151.

‘Revealing Secrets: Talismans, Healthcare and the Market of the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century China’, Social History of Medicine 34, no. 4 (2021): 1068–1093. [Shortlisted for the ‘40th Anniversary Prize of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM)’, 2020]

‘Popular Healing in Printed Medical Books: The Compilation and Publication of the Chuanya 串雅 from the Late Qing through the Republican Period’, Monumenta Serica 66, no. 2 (2018): 391–436.