Room B18/015
Jessica Wang is Professor at the University of British Columbia, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geography and the Department of History. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 before holding postdoctoral fellowships at the National Air and Space Museum (US) and the University of Minnesota. Wang subsequently joined the faculty of the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to UBC in 2006.
Wang currently examines the global contexts of science in the United States, with a focus on tropical agriculture, natural history, and the environmentally-based workings of the U.S. colonial state within the post-1898 US insular empire. As a senior research fellow in the Lise Meitner Research Group, she will continue to pursue this work, as well as to advance a collaborative effort with Dr. Lucas Mueller on “Expertise, Scientific Authority, and Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene.” Both projects rest upon Wang’s career-long engagement with questions about science, expert authority, and state power.
Projects
Science and State Power: Histories for an Anthropogenic Age
Selected Publications
Wang, Jessica (2022). “Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science.” In Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach, ed. J. Krige, 31–73. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820378-002.
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Wang, Jessica (2019). “Plants, Insects, and the Biological Management of American Empire: Tropical Agriculture in Early Twentieth-Century Hawai’i.”. ed. Axel Jansen, John Krige, and Jessica Wang History and Technology, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143.
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Wang, Jessica (2015). “Colonial Crossings: Social Science, Social Knowledge, and American Power from the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War.” In Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge, ed. J. van Dongen, 184–213. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004264229_011.
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Wang, Jessica (2002). “Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America, 1945–1960.” Osiris 17: 323–347.
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Past Events
Colloquium
Expertise and Environment: Reckoning with Scientific Authority in an Anthropogenic Age
MOREPresentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia
Agricultural History Society
STS Colloquium, Cornell University
University of Chicago