Ruth Rogaski

Associate Professor of History

Ruth Rogaski specializes in the history of science, medicine, and the environment in China. She is the author of Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004), which traces how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese studies, the Welch Medal in the history of medicine, and was co-recipient of the Berkshire Prize. She is also the author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which explores how diverse observers created knowledge about northeast Asia’s multiple environments from the seventeenth century to the present. Knowing Manchuria was awarded the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history by the American Society for Environmental History.

Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes for Health have funded her research and writing.   

 

She is currently writing a book on the practice of traditional Chinese medicine in the American South, focusing on her home city of Nashville, Tennessee.