Areas of Research: History of Science and Technology in East Asia

My name is Victor Seow (pronounced “meow” with an “s”), and I am a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in their global contexts and in histories of energy and work. In my research, I set out to better understand how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production have intersected in shaping economic life and environmental outcomes in modern industrial society.


I am the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic politics through the history of East Asia’s onetime largest coal mine. In delving into the origins of fossil-fueled development in China and Japan, this book unearths both the dominant role of the state in energy transitions toward coal and oil and the enduring reliance on human labor power in the carbon age.

Carbon Technocracy has received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies' John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States' Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History.

I am currently researching and writing my next book, tentatively titled "The Human Factor: A History of Science, Work, and the Politics of Production." Through a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present, this book asks how work became a subject of scientific inquiry and how the sciences of work shaped and have been shaped by the wider politics of production. For this project, I am currently finishing an ALM in industrial and organizational psychology at the Harvard Extension School.

I have recently completed two collaborative projects: the first, "Challenging and Re-invigorating China's 'Mr. Science': Global History, Science-Democracy Relations, Universality without Eurocentricism, and Beyond," is a special issue of East Asian Science, Technology and Society, co-edited with Sean Hsiang-lin Lei of Academia Sinica; the second, "Making History: Technologies of Production and the Estate of Knowledge in East Asia," is a special issue of History and Technology, co-edited with Dagmar Schäfer of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

At Harvard, I offer a range of courses on the history of science and technology in China and East Asia and on topics related to industrial society more broadly, such as the history of the factory and the sciences of work. I advise graduate students working on science and technology in China, Japan, and Korea, as well as those focusing on other geographical areas who are interested in the nexus of technology, capitalism, and the environment. My work with graduate students has been recognized with the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

With the support of the Harvard University Asia Center, I convene the Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series, which showcases some of the latest and most exciting work in the history and social studies of science, technology, medicine, and the environment centered on East, South, and Southeast Asia.

Born and raised in Singapore, I received my BA in History and Political Science from McGill University and my PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2017, I was an assistant professor of history at Cornell University.