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. In addition to a book manuscript, Learn Anything!: Cheap Pedagogical Print and the Education of the Modern World, he is at work editing a volume 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 stock image banks. His research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Fulbright Program, and the Mellon Foundation. Prior to his arrival at MPIWG, he trained at Yale, the University of Tokyo, and Harvard (PhD, 2016).