Han Zhang (China)
你好/こんにちは/مرحبا! Originally from Shandong, China, I earned my BA in Public Health Studies, East Asian Studies, Natural Sciences Area, and History of Science, Medicine and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. I was trained in public health and biomedical sciences before finding my intellectual home in history and medical humanities. As a scholar, I am passionate about interdisciplinary medical humanities and the historiography of global health, as well as their application to informing the decolonisation of global health practices.
To me, history of medicine embodies the reclaim of our indigenous cultures of care, poised to rewrite the future of global healing. My experience living in nine different countries across four continents has afforded me a cosmopolitan perspective on global medical history. Engaging with feminist and critical race theories, I aspire to address pressing challenges in the contemporary discourse on health and diseases, including health disparities, the politicisation of health, and the coloniality of global public health.
Currently, my research interests centre around the role of public health governance in non-Western societies and their engagement in the international discourse on infectious disease control. My most recent project, “The Body, Germs, and State Sovereignty: Sanitary Nationalism in Modern China,” examines “sanitary nationalism” in Mao’s Patriotic Health Campaign in the 1950s–1970s, where nationalistic ideologies such as anti-imperialism, state identity, and political citizenship are channelled through mass mobilisation to transform sanitation and hygiene and strengthened national health governance. My previous work on international and global health governance, which considered historical macro-level transformations in the system in light of COVID-19, culminated in a co-authored chapter to be published in the Oxford Handbook of International Institutions.
Beyond my academic pursuits, I am dedicated to mentoring and expanding access to liberal arts education. I have taught seminars on the history of medicine and medical humanities to high school students in China and Japan, where humanities education is traditionally under-appreciated. I am also an avid hiker, a photographer, a traveller, an art and craft enthusiast, and a museum hopper.
