Dr Lewis Bremner

Dr Bremner is the Soon-Young Kim Fellow in the History of East Asian Science and Technology at the Needham Research Institute, and an affiliated postdoctoral researcher at Clare Hall.

He is a historian of science, technology, and medicine with a primary focus on Japan. He received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, followed by a year as Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He has taught at the University of Oxford and held lectureships at the University of California, Berkeley and, most recently, at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

His research is broadly interested in social experiences of science and technology, and in communities that played roles in major changes to knowledge, tools, and practices. It often asks the question: what did these people think they were doing and why? This work covers the history of image projection, the translation of Newtonian ideas, the visual representation of consciousness, and the implementation of irrigation technology, and is loosely situated in a timeframe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

His most recent publication is an edited volume, Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Japan and the Wider World, and his first book is a history of the magic lantern in Japan.