Home >
Time：2026/08/25
Department：Secretariat
Dr. Xin-zhe Xie’s work, titled “Administration of Perception: Observing and Transcribing Dead Bodies in the Forensic Methodology of Qing China (1644-1912),” has been awarded the Derek Price/Rod Webster prize by the History of Science Society, an award for the best research article published in Isis in the past three years. Isis is one of the most important and longstanding international journals in the field of the history of science, with a long record of publishing high-quality and innovative research on the history of science, technology, and medicine, as well as on how scientific ideas, practices, and institutions develop across different historical contexts. Past recipients of the Derek Price/Rod Webster prize include the renowned social historian of science Steven Shapin (1990), and Marta Hanson (2019), who is well known to scholars of Chinese history in Taiwan. The awarded article examines how Qing forensic methodology transformed dead bodies into objects of judicial postmortem examination. It argues that the Qing authorities implemented various devices to standardize not only the forensic examination as an administrative procedure but also the cognitive activities involved, such as corpse observation, wound interpretation, and transcription, thereby normalizing the ways in which a corpse should be regarded and understood to bear forensic significance. This highlights that concerns related to efficient governance did not merely apply scientific knowledge as an auxiliary tool; rather, they could actively shape the formation of the methodology of a discipline of knowledge, to the point that they dictated how the discipline defined its very object of investigation. For more information: https://hssonline.org/page/pricewebster