BuYun Chen is associate professor of Asian History at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (University of Washington Press, 2019). Trained as a historian of premodern China (PhD, Columbia University) with a focus on material culture and history of technology, her research broadly seeks to understand how the circulation of materials informed the making of knowledge and practice. In her current research, she aims to recover the history of how artisans, farmers, and court officials approached political and ecological change during the final century of the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa prefecture). Working at the intersection of history of science, ecological history, and material culture, the project combines the study of historical texts and material artifacts with conservation science and the environmental sciences.
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