Victor Seow

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 science, technology, 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 scientific knowledge, technological artifacts, 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 received several awards in different fields, 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 for International History. It was also named a “Best Book of 2022” by Kirkus Reviews.

I am currently completing my next book, The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age. Through a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present, this study explores how those engaged in this science of work grappled with the tension between devising methods to meet managerial demands for productivity and finding ways to improve workers’ safety and well-being. As part of this project, I finished, in 2024, a master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the Harvard Extension School.

At the broadest level, as someone who is both a historian of science and technology and a historian of East Asia, I am interested in how a focus on issues of science and technology can help us recast our narratives of East Asia’s past and, conversely, how attention to East Asia might reconfigure our understanding of science and technology in the modern world. This is evident in my book projects, articles, and essays. It is also exemplified in two journal special issues that I co-edited: one with Dagmar Schӓfer of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on “Making History: Technologies of Production and the Estate of Knowledge in East Asia” for History and Technology; the other with Sean Hsiang-lin Lei of Academia Sinica on “Challenging and Reinvigorating China’s ‘Mr. Science’: Global History, Science and Democracy, Universality without Eurocentricism, and Beyond” for East Asian Science, Technology and Society.

In 2025, my work was recognized with the Sarton Prize for the History of Science from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 the global history of technology. 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. For my work with graduate students, I received, in 2020, 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 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.