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Daniel Asen
Student, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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Biography
My dissertation, a study of the forensic inquest in Republican Beijing (1912-1949), lies at the intersection of urban history, history of science and medicine, and the cultural history of death. In early 20th century China, police and legal authorities investigated sudden and suspicious deaths with an inquest - a set of practices for examining dead bodies and determining cause of death which had developed during the recently deposed Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The inquest became a site at which urban dwellers, relatives of the suddenly dead, police, judicial officials, pathologists and forensic scientists negotiated the meanings of the dead body and their competing claims over it amidst the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape of early 20th century urban China. My dissertation examines the ethical, legal, and epistemic grounds on which these actors debated, contested and, not uncontroversially, accepted the inquest as a feature of modern life and death in Republican Beijing.
Research Articles
"Vital Spots, Mortal Wounds, and Forensic Practice: Finding Cause of Death in Nineteenth-Century China". East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (November 2009).
"'Manchu Anatomy': Anatomical Knowledge and the Jesuits in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China". Social History of Medicine 22:1 (April 2009), 1-22.
"Approaching Law and Exhausting its (Social) Principles: Jurisprudence as Social Science in Early 20th Century China". Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 2:1 (2008), 213-236.
Selected Presentations
"Building 'Legal Medicine': The Forensic Laboratory in Republican China". 4S Annual Meeting 2009, Washington, DC, October 2009.
"Inquest Officials, Media and Modernity: Everyday Death in Republican Beijing". New England Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Brown University, October 2009.
"Appraised Objects and the Forensic Laboratory: Lin Ji and the Beiping Institute of Legal Medicine, 1930-1937". Presented at "Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change", University of Manchester, September 2009.
"Vital Spots and Mortal Wounds: Finding Cause of Death in Qing Forensics". The 12th International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, Johns Hopkins University, July 2008.
"Images of Corpses in Dianshizhai Pictorial: Boundaries of Culture and Body in Late Qing Shanghai". Second Annual Graduate Student Conference in East Asian Studies, Princeton University, June 2008.
"Visual representation of the body in illustrations of the Manchu Anatomy". Presented at "Medicine & Culture: Chinese-Western Medical Exchange (1644-ca. 1950)", USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, March 2007.
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