Communicating by Juxtaposing:
–a neglected approach to knowledge and its travels–

Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama’s research explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). His recent work includes studies on the imagination of strings in the metaphysics and experience of presence, the visceral fear of excrement in Western medicine, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine, and the surprising web of connections binding the histories of ginseng, opium, tea, silver, and MSG.

Since joining the faculty in 2005, he has also been actively engaged in expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies. He was a pioneer in the development of course trailers at Harvard, founded the Harvard Shorts competition [add url] for scholarly clips, and has held workshops on multimedia presentations of research for faculty and students at many universities around the world. He currently serves on the FAS Standing Committee on IT, the Advisory Committee for the secondary Ph.D. field in Critical Media Practice, and is a Senior Researcher at Harvard’s metaLAB.