Ruth Rogaski

Ruth Rogaski is a historian of Qing and modern China at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1996. She came to Vanderbilt from Princeton University, where she taught from 1996 to 2003. Rogaski has written widely on transnational histories of science and medicine in the early modern and modern period. 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 19th and 20th centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies, and 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 examines the intersection between natural history and projects of empire in northeast Asia from the 17th century to the present. She is currently working on a history of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the American South. Grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the American Philosophical Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation have funded her research and writing.