Wuyutong Yao

I have always been fascinated by the history of work in relation to skill and knowledge-making. Now I become increasingly interested in human work in relation to nature. My work is situated at the intersections of the history of medicine and technology, labor history, and environmental history.

I am working on a book project which examines the production of natural medicinal products in China from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. With a focus on human processes and the local environment, this project investigates how China’s marginalized highland people collected, preserved, and processed “natural” medicinal products, as well as how they adapted their work to a changing environment while changing the environment themselves. This project reveals the invisible labour, knowledge, local technological innovations, and environmental changes embedded in natural medicinal products.

I began my history training first at the University of Chicago (MA) and then at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I obtained my PhD in the summer of 2022. Following that, I joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University as a research associate on a Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia. Then I joined the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies as an Oriental Oak Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. 

I am an Associate Member at St Antony's College.