Charlotte Lai

Research Interests: Global East Asia; environmental history; multispecies studies; history of biology and the natural sciences; historical ecology; cultural geography; global early modernity.

My name is Charlotte Lai, and I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2025 with a BA in History. My primary interests lie in the study of human-animal relations, historical ecology, and environmental history. 

My undergraduate research focused primarily on human-animal relations in early modern East Asia, with a specific focus on the cultural-material geographies of whaling in Tokugawa Japan.

In the History of Science Master's program, I intend to study the complex entanglements between humans, animals, and the environment, reintroducing more-than-human agencies and the ‘multispecies paradigm’ into early modern environmental history. My current research concerns exotic animals exchanged as gifts in diplomatic relations in early modern Eurasia, particularly how these animals were ‘estranged’ - both culturally and ecologically - within the burgeoning webs of global trade. I am also beginning research into the more-than-human geographies of the Ainu-Japanese frontier in Ezo (modern-day Hokkaido). 

I intend to leverage my multimedia experience in wildlife photography and foraging to inform my approach to historical work. In this, I hope to recontextualize conventional approaches to the production, presentation, and dissemination of knowledge, mirroring the complex diversity of the various ‘ways of knowing’ in the natural sciences - and indeed the world which inspires it. 

Previous Degrees:

B.A., History, University of Oxford