We are delighted to share that Clare Hall Affiliated Posdoc Dr Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira has recently been recognised for his outstanding PhD research. He has received the 2024 Royal Asiatic Society Bayly Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for doctoral research in Asian studies, as well as the 8th Dissertation Prize of the Division of History of Science and Technology from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the world’s largest academic association for the history and philosophy of science.

Luis is currently a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), University of Cambridge, where he is revising his PhD thesis for publication as a monograph. The book, titled The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Medicine and the Occult in Chinese Modernity, explores the Chinese enthusiasm for mental abilities and paranormal phenomena, and the ways in which these shaped conceptions of health and religious experience in early 20^th-century China. It interrogates how psychical research, a field devoted to the scientific investigation of phenomena such as hypnotism and extrasensory perception, was appropriated by Chinese reformers in their efforts to modernise their country.

In his research, Luis poses the following question: How did psychical research – a new, foreign science initially promoted by only a select few – evolve into a widespread social movement in Republican China (1912-1949)? Adopting a transnational perspective, Luis illustrates how Chinese elites adopted and adapted Japanese and Western psychical research to articulate a sophisticated vision of ‘spiritual modernity’ – one that aimed to interweave science, traditional knowledge and the exploration of the mind as a project to revitalise China. Contrary to the expectation that modern science and medicine would create a world devoid of spiritual meaning, Luis demonstrates that the mind sciences instead sparked renewed interest in spiritual, traditional and occult knowledge in early 20th-century China. More broadly, his book examines how spiritual beliefs have both influenced and been transformed by developments in modern medicine, science and psychology.

Luis’ manuscript is under review with the Cambridge University Press book series ‘Science in History’. Last month, his first edited volume, Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, was published by Amsterdam University Press.

In the coming months, Luis will continue at HPS under a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, alongside a new appointment as Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His next book project, Healing through the Mind: The Rise of Mind-Cure Movements in Modern East Asia, explores how laypeople in China and Japan reinvented their own traditions of self-cultivation by engaging with ‘mind-cure’: various popular, early 20th-century global movements championing self-care and mental healing.

Warm congratulations to Luis, and we look forward to following his upcoming work!