Dr Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira is a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Starting May 2025, he will continue at the same department as a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow.
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, and a master’s degree in Chinese History from Fudan University, China. His Wellcome Trust-funded PhD – awarded in October 2023 with no revisions – won the ‘2024 British Association for Chinese Studies Best Doctoral Thesis Award’. Prior to coming to Cambridge, he worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for the Social History of Health & Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, for 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 and mental health in modern East Asia and the history of alternative medicine in South America. His first edited volume, Therapy, Spirituality and East Asian Imaginaries, will be released by Amsterdam University Press in early 2025. In 2024, he received a USD 60,000 grant from the D. Kim Foundation to support the revision and publication of his first monograph, titled The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Medicine and the Occult in Chinese Modernity. 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 amongst educated Chinese elites in spirituality, traditional knowledge and occult practices during the first half of the 20th century.
Select publications
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Medicine and the Occult in Chinese Modernity. [Monograph in progress; under review with Cambridge University Press]
- Gaitanidis, Ioannis, Luis F. B. Junqueira, Avery Morrow and Han Sang-yun, eds. Therapy, Spirituality and East Asian Imaginaries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming.
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘Disembodied Spirits or Mental Suggestion? Psychical Research and the Redefinition of Superstition in Republican China’. In Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History, edited by Emily Baum and Albert Wu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming.
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘Door Amulets’. In Chinese Religious Culture in 100 Objects, edited by Adam Y. Chau. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘Medicine in Chinese History’. In Routledge Research Encyclopedia of Chinese Studies, edited by Chris Shei and Sui He. London: Routledge, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367565152-RECHS78-1.
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘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. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22236. [Winner of the ‘2021 John C. Burnham Early Career Award’]
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘Numinous Herbs: Stars, Spirits, and Medicinal Plants in Late Imperial China’. In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, edited by Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, 456–472. London: Routledge, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203740262-36.
- Junqueira, Luis F. B. ‘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. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab035. [Shortlisted for the ‘40th Anniversary Prize of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine’, 2020]
Select awards
- Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Leverhulme Trust & Isaac Newton Trust: GBP 160,020 (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
Personal website: https://luisfbj.com/
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9085-8689
