Victor Seow (Harvard University), “ ‘A Useful and Protean Concept?’: Energy in History” (Program in the History of Science and Medicine)

Victor Seow (pronounced “meow” with an “s”) is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in modern China and Japan within global contexts and in histories of energy and work. In his research, he sets out to understand how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production intersect in shaping economic life and environmental landscapes within modern industrial society.

 

He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic politics through the history of what was once East Asia’s 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. 

 

At present, Victor is researching and writing his next book, tentatively titled “Human Factors: The Science of Work and the Nature of Labor.” 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 wider societal discourses about the meaning and value of labor.

 

He has 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, Victor offers 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. He advises 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 intersections of technology, capitalism, and the environment. He is also a member of the Standing Committee for the PhD in History and East Asian Languages. His work with graduate students has been recognized with an Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

 

With the support of the Harvard University Asia Center, he convenes 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, Victor received his BA in History and Political Science from McGill University and his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2017, he was an assistant professor of history at Cornell University.

 

Twitter: @EastAsiaSciTech