Michael Stanley-Baker

Dr. Michael Stanley-Baker specializes in the history of Chinese medicine and religion, particularly Daoism. He received his PhD from University College London, and has worked and studied at Indiana University, Bloomington; Academia Sinica, Taipei; and the Needham Institute, Cambridge. He has done fieldwork with healers in Taiwan and China, and also has a clinical degree in Chinese medicine from Ruseto College, Boulder CO and NCCAOM qualifications. He currently serves as treasurer on the council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines (IASTAM), and as an associate of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanities. In his role on IASTAM council, he has overseen three international conferences of the society and the production of the journal, Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity. IASTAM is a practitioner-scholar society which provides an intellectual platform to better understand the continuity and change of Asian medicines within global modernity. It incorporates the world’s leading historians and anthropologists of Traditional Asian Medicines in productive dialogue with practitioners, ethnobotanists, and analysts of policy and global health. Dr. Stanley-Baker is currently a researcher with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin Centre for the History of Knowledge, where he is working on two projects. One focuses on medical pluralism and the role of religion in the production of medical knowledge in premodern China, informing the ways in which traditional practices of Chinese healthcare have been reevaluated in relation to modern medicine. The second develops new digital tools to better locate changing uses of drugs in China across time, space and different communities of users, to pinpoint translational strategies and adaptive practices across communities.