Ying Li

Research Interests: Cold War science and technology; technoscientific modernity; agrarian studies; political ecology; multispecies relations; scientific institutions; work, labor, and technology in everyday life; modern China.

Ying is a PhD student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. She is interested in histories at the intersection of socio-ecological relations, technological infrastructures, and scientific knowledge production, with a particular focus on socialist science and twentieth-century global East Asia. Her previous research investigated how migrant commercial beekeepers in collectivized-era rural China navigated the Maoist planned economy by leveraging ecological rhythms, beekeeping technologies, transportation logistics, pharmaceutical production chains, and competing forms of agrotechnical expertise. Ying aspires to write histories that connect broader geopolitical processes to the local networks of people, institutions, and communities through which knowledge, technologies, and non-human life circulate and take root.

Publications:

“Moving with the Hive: Beekeeping, Informal Economies, and Mobility in Mao-Era China.” Agricultural History. Forthcoming.

Previous Degrees:

B.A., History, University of Toronto
M.A. East Asian Studies, University of Toronto