Dr Shan Jiang

Dr Shan Jiang was a Visiting Research Fellow in 2018-19

Shan holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Medical Humanities in Peking University. Her research interests concern the history of medicine and technology, as well as the theory of acupuncture. She primarily engages in ancient images and sculptures of acupuncture from a comparative perspective.

Shan received her MD degree from the Institute of Acupuncture-Moxibustion at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in 2017. Concepts and controversial theories of acupuncture-moxibustion were her main focus. Her dissertation titled “A Study of Qi in Classical Acupuncture-Moxibustion Theory” gave a thorough and deep analysis on the polysemous character 气 used in Huangdi Neijing and Nanjing to solve ambiguous problems in teaching and clinical practice. Half of her research was published as a monograph named “Acu-Moxa and Qi”. Shan obtained a Master of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages from Beijing Language and Culture University. She was trained to teach Chinese language based on theories of cognitive linguistics and completed an internship in McMaster University for a semester.

Since UCL’s expansive library holds vast sources and numerous rare book collections relevant to history of science and technology, Shan widened and deepened her current research during her fellowship. She conducted a comparative study on sculptures for Acu-Moxa in China and Japan during the Edo period. Her project aimed to analyse the historical and cultural motivation behind the phenomenon of the flourishing of these sculptures over a 200 years period. In addition, she collected images and sources relevant to Acu-Moxa in London.