Trained in Chinese studies and history of science, Martina Siebert’s research interests centres on intellectual and material aspects of Chinese history and culture with a specialization in the history of science and technology from the 11th to the 19th century. She has published on Chinese monographs on nature studies and material culture (pulu 譜錄), on Chinese narratives of technological inventions (wuyuan 物原), on Chinese classification schemes for animals and on the digitization of Chinese materials.
Martina received her PhD at the Free University of Berlin in 2002 and has worked at the Free University of Berlin, University of Würzburg, Chinese Normal University in Beijing, the Humboldt University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and as a research fellow and area specialist at the State Library of Berlin.
Projects
Cultural Traditions of Technical Knowledge
Historicized Innovation: Knowledge Tradition and its Encounter with the New
Making the Qing Palace Machine Work
Monumentalized or Marginalized, Writings about Technology in Chinese History: A Database
Planning Plants: Growing and Organizing Lotus in Qing Imperial Spaces
Selected Publications
Past Events
Colloquium
The Search for Rutie the Horse: Infertility Research and Settlement in Palestine/Israel
MOREColloquium
Planning for Persistent Environmental Contamination: Public Health, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, and the Settler Colonial State
MOREColloquium
The Cambridge Cockpit and the Berlin Cockpit. Problems in the Study of Flying Fatigue c. 1940
MOREColloquium
Counting for Empire: the 1925 National Census and Colonial Korea's Experience of a New Demographic Regime
MOREColloquium
Planning a Colonial Cultural Economy: Arts and Crafts in the Belgian Congo
MOREColloquium
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: On the Simultaneous Visualization of Horizontal and Vertical Transmission in Historical Linguistics
MOREPresentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
AAS annual conference 2016, Seattle 31.3.-3.4.2016 (Panel organized by Shellen Wu: Cultivating the Frontiers: Agricultural Knowledge, Modernization, and the State in Western China, 1800-1962)
HSS 2015, San Francisco 19.-22.2015
14th ICHSEA, Paris 6.-10.7.2015 (Panel organized by Qiong ZHANG & Martina Siebert: Strange Nature, Strange Technologies: Exploring the Inexplicable in Early Modern East Asia)