Hello! My name is Genie Yoo and I’m excited to be an Educational Resources Fellow (alongside my colleague Lorna Ebner) at the Medical Heritage Library this summer. In collaboration with librarians
and curators, faculty and fellows, I will be curating a new collection on the theme of climate change and medicine. My goal is to create an accessible collection for students, educators, and the general public, highlighting the rich digitized resources available through the Medical Heritage Library’s archive.
By way of a quick introduction, I am a historian of early modern and modern island Southeast Asia,
working at the intersection of history of science, medicine, environment, and religion. My dissertation, titled Mediating Islands: Ambon Across the Ages, explores the history of colonial and indigenous knowledge-making about the natural world of the spice islands, particularly the island of Ambon in present-day Indonesia. I demonstrate how imperial and indigenous knowledge production about nature, medicine, and the environment was inextricably tied to the archipelago’s inter-island Islamic networks.
My interest in climate change has everything to do with the past, present, and the uncertain futures of the islands I study, touching on natural resource extraction, colonialism, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. And as the World Health Organization announced in 2021, climate change poses the gravest health threat to society on a global scale. It is estimated to affect over 930 million people worldwide, especially the most vulnerable. In order to understand the link between climate change and health inequities, I plan to curate a collection that highlights, among other things, the historical connections between climate, medicine, and empire, and the development of different scientific and medical fields, from medical climatology and minerology to tropicalmedicine and hydrology.
Upon defending my dissertation this summer, I will continue to explore these themes using indigenous manuscripts as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the ERC-funded project, “Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies,” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If you would like to chat further, you can reach me by email at jhyoo@princeton.edu or find me on Twitter @genieyoo818. For samples of my public writing, feel free to check out my blogposts at Environmental History Now and The Recipes Project:
- “Birds in Life and in Ink: An Errant Tracing,” Environmental History Now:
https://envhistnow.com/2021/09/07/birds-in-life-and-in-ink-an-errant-tracing/ - “Drinking the Ink of Prayer,” The Recipes Project:
https://recipes.hypotheses.org/17556
I’m excited to learn from this fellowship and look forward to sharing the collection with you at the
end of the summer!