Michael Stanley-Baker

Michael Stanley-Baker is an award-winning historian of Chinese Medicine and Religion, with a focus first in the early Imperial period, and in the moder Sinophone diaspora. He received his PhD from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University, Bloomington, and also has a clinical degree in Chinese medicine. His research concerns the diverse intersections of Chinese medicine with different knowledge cultures, whether religion, botany, trade or modern biology and policy. He uses close reading, participant interview, and digital humanities. His editorial projects include the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, and Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, by Manchester University Press, as well as special issues of Asian Medicine, East Asian Science Technology and Medicine, and the Pacific Neigbhourhood Consortium. His new monograph, Situating Religion and Medicine in Early Imperial China (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), argues that situating technical practices is an important method to understand how historical actors organised knowledge in their own terms. It argues that the Six Dynasties period was a key period for medico-religious practice due to events at the collapse of China's first major imperial dynasty. Stanley-Baker's Digital Humanities project, Polyglotasianmedicine.com, includes digital maps of early Chinese pharmacopoeii, full-text archives of Buddhist, Daoist and Medical texts, as well as Peranakan and Malay text archives. The Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph links traditional medicine with modern science, by linking Chinese and Malay traditional drug names with modern botany, and online TCM, biodiversity, and bioactivity databases. Dr. Stanley-Baker has won international awards for scholarship and teaching in both traditional and digital forms: Koh Boon Hwee Teaching Award (Inspirational Mentorship) Best Data Set, 2nd Runner-up. DH Awards 2023 (Polyglot Asian Medicine) John Cheung Award for Teaching 2022 (Social Media). Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine #1 Top Ten Open Access Social Science Books, Routledge. #13 New China Books of the Year. Zhu Kezhen Junior Award (International Society for the History of East Asian Science Technology and Medicine ISHEASTM) ("Palpating the Divine," 2012) He has held research positions at leading institutions around the world, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Academia Sinica, Taipei; the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge; the Forschungs Kolleg for Multiple Secularities at Leipzig University and the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Stanley-Baker has won over SGD$1.2 million in research grants and fellowships from around the world, including the Max Planck institute for the History of Science, the Wellcome Trust, Chiang-ching Kuo foundation, Henry Luce/ACLS Foundation, Ministries of Education in Singapore and Taiwan, Singapore National Heritage Board and others. He serves as President of the International Association for the Study of Asian Medicine (IASTAM), where he is changing the communication policy to establish Asian medicines as a high-profile, multi-disciplinary field of study, and IASTAM as a global authority and research resource. He coordinates this work with his role as co-chair of the Healing Arts at the MIT Centre for Comparative Global Humanities, where he is organising multi-disciplinary workshops to set out collaborative research and project development agendae on traditional Asian medicines. He also serves on the Daoist Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion, is an active member of ISHEASTM and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and in 2023 hosted the History of Medicine in South East Asia (HOMSEA) conference at NTU. ORCID: 0000-0001-6785-8501