Postdoctoral researcher, University of Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford.
Dr Baihui Duan is a postdoctoral researcher employed by the Aftermath project at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. She concurrently holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Baihui received her master’s degree from the Academy of Korean Studies in 2018 and her PhD (cum laude) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2022.
Baihui’s research examines the history of war, environment, disease, medicine, and governance in East Asia, particularly after the Imjin War. Combining approaches from historical and geospatial analysis, she examines how nature and infectious diseases shaped migration, disaster relief, medical care, and governance in pre-modern Korea. She considers how the impact of epidemics spread beyond Korea’s borders to affect East Asian military strategy, commerce, diplomacy, and the circulation of medical knowledge, shedding light on interlinked histories of infectious diseases and environmental crises in the region. Through a comparison with the European history of public health, her project also contributes to the neglected field of epidemic management in pre-modern East Asia, opening up questions of power and its political meaning in global discourses of health.
Publications (selected):
Baihui Duan, Rebekah Clements. “Fighting for Forests: Protection and Exploitation of Kŏje Island Timber during the East Asian War of 1592 to 1598”, Environmental History 2022, vol.27(3), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719781. (Winner, 2023 Vandervort Prize, The Society for Military History).
Baihui Duan. “Clothing, Food and Dwelling: Western Views of Korean Life in the Early Nineteenth Century”, European Journal of Korean Studies 18(2): 2019, 127-152.
