Dr Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira is a Leverhulme Trust & Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Previously, he held a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the same department.
Born and raised in Brazil, he has called Ponte Serrada, Florianópolis, Nanjing, Shanghai, London, Sendai, Livorno, Glasgow, and Hong Kong his home.
Dr Junqueira holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, a master’s degree in Chinese History from Fudan University, China, and a PhD in History from UCL. His Wellcome Trust-funded PhD – awarded in 2023 with no revisions – won the Royal Asiatic Society Bayly Prize in Asian Studies, the British Association for Chinese Studies Best Doctoral Thesis Award, and the IUHPST Dissertation Prize of the Division of History of Science and Technology. Prior to Cambridge, he worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for the Social History of Health & Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, as part of the Wellcome-Trust funded project ‘Medical Humanities in China and the UK’.
He is a global historian specialising in the intersections of science, medicine, and religion in 19th– and 20th-century China, with extended interests in the histories of psychology, mental health, and alternative medicine in modern East Asia and South America. He is editor of Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries (Amsterdam University Press 2025). In 2024, he received a USD 60,000 grant from the D. Kim Foundation to support the completion of his first monograph, The Science of the Spirit: Mind, Medicine, and the Impossible in Chinese Modernity, under review with Cambridge University Press (‘Science in History’ series). Challenging the expectation that the introduction of modern science and technology would create a world devoid of spiritual meaning, his monograph reveals how the mind sciences instead rekindled interest among Chinese elites in spirituality, traditional knowledge, and occult practices during the first half of the 20th century.
Select publications
- The Science of the Spirit: Mind, Medicine, and the Impossible in Chinese Modernity. Under review with Cambridge University Press (‘Science in History’ series).
- ‘Door Amulets’, in Adam Y. Chau, ed., Chinese Religious Culture in 100 Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- ‘Disembodied Spirits or Mental Suggestion? Psychical Research and the Redefinition of Superstition in Republican China’, in Emily Baum and Albert Wu, eds., Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2026).
- Therapy, Spirituality and East Asian Imaginaries (co-edited withIoannis Gaitanidis, Avery Morrow, and Han Sang-yun), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025.
- ‘From Eden to Aquarius: Oriental Medicine, Natural Healing and the Market of Self-Care Books in Brazil in the 1970s’, in Ioannis Gaitanidis, Luis F. B. Junqueira, Avery Morrow and Han Sang-yun, eds., Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025).
- ‘Medicine in Chinese History’, in Routledge Research Encyclopedia of Chinese Studies,edited by Chris Shei and Sui He (London: Routledge, 2024).
- ‘The Power Within: Mass Media, Scientific Entertainment, and the Introduction of Psychical Research into China, 1900–1920’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 59, no. 2 (2023): 193–216. [Winner of the ‘2021 John C. Burnham Early Career Award’, conferred by the Forum for History of Human Science and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences]
- ‘Numinous Herbs: Stars, Spirits, and Medicinal Plants in Late Imperial China’, in Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2022), 456–472.
- ‘What Not to Eat, How Not to Treat: Medical Prohibitions’ (co-authored with Vivienne Lo), in Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2022), 303–319.
- ‘Entre Agulhas e Mãos: Contracultura e a popularização da medicina chinesa no brasil na década de 1970’ (Needles and Hands: Counterculture and the Popularisation of Chinese Medicine in Brazil in the 1970s)’ (co-authored with Renata P. Sigolo), Locus 27, no. 1 (2021): 122–151.
- ‘Revealing Secrets: Talismans, Healthcare and the Market of the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century China’, Social History of Medicine 34, no. 4 (2021): 1068–1093. [Shortlisted for the ‘40th Anniversary Prize of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM)’, 2020]
- ‘Popular Healing in Printed Medical Books: The Compilation and Publication of the Chuanya 串雅 from the Late Qing through the Republican Period’, Monumenta Serica 66, no. 2 (2018): 391–436.
Select awards
- Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, Leverhulme Trust & Isaac Newton Trust: GBP 167,020 (2025-2028)
- D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship: USD 60,000 (2024-2025)
- D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship: USD 30,000 (2022-2023)
- Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship in Medical Humanities: GBP 148,917 (2019-2022)
Further links
PPersonal website: https://luisfbj.com/
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9085-8689
