Emily Baum, professeure invitée à l’EHESS
Emily Baum, professeur d’histoire de la Chine moderne à l’Université de Californie à Irvine, participe au programme Professeurs invités de l’EHESS, sur proposition de Xavier Paulès (CCJ-CECMC), du 31 octobre au 30 novembre 2025.

Biographie
Emily Baum is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where she researches and teaches the history of modern China and the history of medicine. She is the author of The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China (University of Chicago, 2018), which was shortlisted for the ICAS (International Convention of Asia Scholars) 2021 Best Book Prize. Her two forthcoming books include a co-edited volume, Uncanny Beliefs: Superstition in Modern Chinese History (Harvard Asia Center, 2026), and Needled: How Acupuncture Became Alternative (Viking). At UC Irvine, she directs the Long US-China Institute and the Graduate Emphasis in Medical Humanities. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego, her MA from Columbia University, and her BA from Georgetown University.
Website: https://sites.uci.edu/emilybaum/
Conférences
From the Home to the Asylum (and Back): Managing Madness in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing
This talk addresses the shift from home confinement to public institutionalization of the insane in early twentieth-century China. Using police records from the Beijing Municipal Asylum, I show how local families took advantage of government social services as a strategic means by which to relieve themselves of the financial and emotional demands of caring for their mentally ill relatives. In so doing, these families also pushed the boundaries of what behaviors could legitimately be considered “mad.” By the middle of the Republican period (1912-1949), families in Beijing had begun to invoke the charge of madness not simply for the violent and criminally insane, but also for those who merely disrupted the normal patterns of life. As an ironic consequence of the growing number of mentally ill patients under state jurisdiction, the managers of the Municipal Asylum began to once again insist on the primacy of domestic care.
► Séminaire « Chine républicaine, nouvelles approches historiques » (Xavier Paulès, Coraline Jortay et Delphine Spicq), mardi 25 novembre 14h30-16h30, salle 3.09, Centre de colloques, Cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers
Needle Diplomacy: China, the Cold War, and the Globalization of Acupuncture
In the early 1970s, while China was emerging from the height of the Cultural Revolution, a surprising technology helped pave the way for the future rapprochement between China and the Western world: the acupuncture needle. As an ostensibly apolitical practice, acupuncture came to serve as a scientific lubricant that eased the tensions between the two Cold War blocs, providing an entryway into people-to-people exchanges and future intellectual collaborations. At the same time, by showcasing China’s ability to break new ground in the realm of medicine and surgery, acupuncture became a form of soft power that highlighted the innovative capacity of Chinese communism and the revolutionary potential of Mao Zedong Thought. Through a device as innocuous as an acupuncture needle, the Chinese government was able to not just extol the effectiveness of Maoism on a global scale, but to also – albeit briefly – direct the terms of its diplomatic engagements with the capitalist West.
►conférence coorganisée par le Centre Alexandre Koyré et le CCJ, référente CAK : Wu Huiyi, référent CCJ : Xavier Paulès, vendredi 7 novembre 14h30-16h30, salle 25A, bât. EHESS-Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers
How Qi Became ‘Energy’: The Transnational Roots of a Chinese Medical Concept
Scholars and physicians working beyond Asia have long struggled with how to translate the Chinese concept of qi. Although qi is typically rendered today as “energy,” this translation is a relatively recent one. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese-English dictionaries offered vastly different definitions of qi, including breath, air, vapor, ether, and vivifying force. Why, then, did “energy” – a construct most closely related to physics and chemistry – become associated with this foreign medical and philosophical concept? As this talk will show, the association of qi with energy came about because of a temporary partnership that was forged between the biological sciences, Chinese medicine, and parapsychology in the 1970s. This unlikely intersection of phenomena, which emerged as a result of new circulations of knowledge and people during the Cold War, reinforced the conceptual correlation between qi and energy – a definition that has become the normative interpretation of qi today.
La conférence d’Emily Baum sera précédée de celle de Hu Su (Beijing University of Science and Technology), « Maps and Materia Medica Depictions as non-Representations in Qing China ».
►Séminaire « Sciences et savoirs de l’Asie orientale dans la mondialisation (XVIe-XXIe siècle) » (Catherine Jami, Wu Huiyi, Zhao Bing), lundi 10 novembre 14h30-18h30, salle 50, bât. EHESS-Condorcet, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers
Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/97614558435?pwd=bCx3yarm7PziCoICSio9BdkLu5LB3r.1
ID de réunion: 976 1455 8435
Code secret: BzKz1g
Uncanny Beliefs: The Regulation and Persistence of Superstition in Modern China
In the early twentieth century, theorists around the world believed that “superstition” belonged to an era destined for irrelevance. Yet despite their confident predictions, so-called superstitions have endured. Perhaps nowhere has the history of superstition been more prolonged and tumultuous than in China. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, intellectuals and governing regimes have denigrated practices like divination, ancestor worship, and geomancy as unscientific, irrational, and unbefitting of a modern nation. Their attempts to root out such practices, however, have regularly encountered resistance from individuals who continue to find meaning in them. This talk seeks to understand what “superstition” has meant in modern China – and why acts deemed superstitious have remained so compelling to so many people, even in the face of continuous efforts to eradicate them.
► Séminaire « Histoire du taoïsme et des religions chinoises » (Vincent Goossaert), lundi 17 novembre 15h-17h, salle 9, EPHE, 54 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (10 octobre 2025). Emily Baum, professeure invitée à l’EHESS. Carnets du Centre Chine (CNRS/EHESS). Consulté le 13 novembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14w3d


Bonjour,
Merci pour l’infomation. Est-il prévu une possibilité d’assister en ligne à ces interventions? Ce serait une bonne idée qui populariserait les études chinoises dans le grand public dont une partie non négligeable s’intéresse notamment au qi via le qigong, le taiji quan, et autres daoyin fa.
Bonjour,
A ma connaissance, la visioconférence n’est pas prévue.
Le mieux serait de contacter directement les responsables de séminaires : https://enseignements.ehess.fr/2025-2026/intervenants
Cordialement