Self-introduction

Over the past decade, my primary scholarly concern has been how modern science shaped Chinese people’s mental landscapes and self-understanding. My first monograph, The Polyphonic Psyche: Hypnotism and Popular Science in Modern China (in Chinese), investigates the entry of dynamic psychology and the idea of “unconscious” into China through the medium of hypnotism, showing how hypnotic practices transformed people’s embodied experiences and notions of the self. Focusing on ordinary participants outside academic elites, the book highlights stage performances, public lectures and associations, and hands-on experiments as arenas where non-specialists engaged with mind sciences while also questioning the boundaries between science, metaphysics, and superstition.

My current project, tentatively titled Measuring Chinese Minds: Mental Ability and the Making of Racial Nationalism in Modern China, examines the diverse methods of measurement Chinese scientists in the first half of the twentieth century employed to define and assess the mental characteristics of the Chinese people. It also considers the ways in which these scientific “numerical facts” were mobilized to envision possibilities for racial and national transformation.

Looking further ahead, I hope to develop two lines of research: first, to write a history of psychology centered on Taiwan; second, to trace the history of occupational medicine and labor health in twentieth-century East Asia, with particular attention to China and Taiwan.
 

Education

• DPhil, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford
• MSS, Institute of Science, Technology and Society, National Yang-Ming University
• MD, Faculty of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University

My Website

Resumé

• Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

Academic honors

Research fields

• History of Science, History of Medicine and Public Health, STS (Science, Technology and Society)

Research projects

Publications

Monographs, Collected Essays 張邦彥，2021，《近代中国的催眠术与大众科学》，共269頁，上海：上海人民出版社。 張邦彥，2020，《精神的複調：近代中國的催眠術與大眾科學》，共319頁，新北：聯經出版。

Journal articles Pang-Yen Chang, 2025, “Struggling with Exactitude in a Fragmented State: Intelligence Testing in Early Twentieth-Century China”, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, 63(1), 73-100.

Book chapter 張邦彥，2023，〈在過與不及之間：當代臺灣的生育政策論辯（1950s–2010s）〉，葉明叡、劉曦宸編，《以健康之名？：10道公衛政策倫理難題，培養公民思辨力》，頁77-98，新北：聯經出版。

Book review 張邦彥，2020，〈東亞精神科學史可以走多遠？評《精神科學與近代東亞》〉，《醫療社會史研究》，8, 289-300。