Hansun Hsiung

Hansun Hsiung combines methods from book history and the history of science to address fundamental problems in the global history of knowledge. His research to date has traced the transformation of print networks between Japan and western Europe, ca. 1750-1900, detailing—a story that thrusts missionaries, opium smugglers, and pirate publishers alongside samurai-scholars in the co-production of Western knowledge.

He is at work editing a special issue on the role of "compression" as a virtue in communications and information management systems, as well as a second monograph project on the prehistory of long-distance image transmission, rethinking the genealogy of tele-vision before the advent of contemporary televisual technologies.

Prior to his arrival at Durham, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Music and Media Studies at Humboldt University (Berlin). His research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Fulbright Program, and the Mellon Foundation.