Jongsik Christian Yi

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

Jongsik Christian Yi is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy (STP) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He completed a PhD in History of Science at Harvard University in May 2022. 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 veterinary and horticultural sciences in modern China and the appropriation of Lysenkoism and Soviet soil science in China and North Vietnam. Currently, he is completing his first monograph, More-Than People's Communes: Veterinary Workers and Nonhuman Animals in Mao-Era China.

Publications:

Yi, More-Than People’s Communes: Veterinary Workers and Nonhuman Animals in Mao-Era China (under contract with the University of Chicago Press).

Yi, “Maoist Pigs: Swine, Communes, and the State in Rural China, 1949–1976,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 85, No. 2 (May 2026): 287–311.

Yi, “Rabbit Spleen and Medicinal Herbs: Animal Infectious Diseases, Grassroots Communes, and the State in Maoist China,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Summer 2024): 298–325.

Yi, “Decolonization and Self-Reflection: Teaching the Korean History of Science in South Korea,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 54, No. 1 (February 2024): 121–124.

Yi, “Dialectical Materialism Serves Voluntarist Productivism: The Epistemic Foundation of Lysenkoism in Socialist China and North Vietnam," Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 54, No. 3 (September 2021): 513–539.

Previous Degrees:

B.A., History, Korea University
M.A., Asian History, Korea University
Ph.D., A.M., History of Science, Harvard University