Research Interests: Science and socialism, veterinary medicine; animal history; agrarian studies; China and Vietnam.

Jongsik Christian Yi completed a PhD in History of Science at Harvard University in May 2022. Born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Seoul, South Korea, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History from Korea University. He is broadly interested in the historical interplay among science, socialism, agriculture, and nonhuman animals in twentieth-century China and Vietnam. He has been working on the history of horticultural science in modern China and the appropriation of Lysenkoism and Soviet soil science in China and North Vietnam. Currently, he is completing his dissertation, “More-Than-People’s Communes: Veterinarians, Animals, and the Science and Labor for Multispecies Communal Subsistence in Maoist China” (Diss. Committee: Victor Seow, Janet Browne, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and Warwick Anderson).

Presentations:

“Science and Commune: Grassroots Veterinarians, Animal Patients, and Science for Multispecies Communal Subsistence in Maoist China,” presented at Junior Scholar’s Salon, The Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Peking University, Beijing, China, June 2, 2021 (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7hwGhGaKGM5YjRU3Vk9TBQ).

“What Does “Lysenkoism” Mean from China and Vietnam?: The Soviet Agricultural Biology in China and Vietnam, 1949-1982,” presented at the Annual Conference for the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), March 2019.

“Scions and Rootstocks: The Chinese Honey Nectar Peach and the Grafting of Science, 1922-1965,” presented at the Annual Conference for the History of Science Society (HSS), November 2018.

Publications:

Jongsik Christian Yi, “Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of “Lysenkoism” in Socialist China and North Vietnam,” Journal of the History of Biology (forthcoming).

The Korean Edition of Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016) (Translated by Jongsik Christian Yi, Seoul: East Asia Books, forthcoming).

Previous Degrees:
B.A., History, Korea University
M.A., Asian History, Korea University

Ph.D., A.M., History of Science, Harvard University