Lan A. Li is a historian of the body and filmmaker focusing on medicine and health in global East Asia. Li received a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Society Studies from MIT in 2016 and served as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. Li’s first book manuscript, Body Maps: Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine, explores a visual history of mapping meridians onto peripheral nerves from the early modern period to the twentieth century. Li’s second project centers on a transnational history of numbness, which situates numbness, or ma 麻, in categories of flavor and food before tracking its transformation into a pathological side effect. Dr. Li is teaching undergraduate courses on the history of sensations, the history of the body, and the history of science and technology. Their film and media work has led to collaborations with medical practitioners in Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, New York, and Boston. Li is the co-founder and co-host of the exhibition Metaphors of the Mind and directs the Medicine Race Democracy Lab and the metastasis podcast.
 

Selected Publications:

• Li, L. “Numbing Aesthetics: Taste and Tempers of Peppercorn / Mountain Pepper / Sanshō.” Gastronomica. 20.4: 64-74. 
• Li, L. “Sunk from Sight: Mapping the Fluid Body.” In Fluid Matter(s): Flow and Transformation in the History of the Body, edited by Natalie Köhle and Shigehisa Kuriyama. Asian Studies Monograph Series 14. Canberra, ANU Press, 2020. doi.org/10.22459/FM.2020
• Li, L. “Medical Poetics: Global Health Humanities on Film and the Case of 心.” In The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, eds P. Crawford, B. Brown, & A. Charise, 163–72. 2020.
• Li, L. “Pinpricks: Needling, Numbness, and Temporalities of Pain.” In Imagining the Brain: Episodes in the History of Brain Research, 1st ed., 243: 205–29. Academic Press, 2018.
• Li, L. “Invisible Bodies: Lu Gwei-djen & the Specter of Translation.” Asian Medicine 13 (1–2): 33-68.
• Li, L. “The Edge of Expertise: Representing Barefoot Doctors in Cultural Revolution China.” Endeavour 39, no. 3–4 (September 2015): 160–67.

Selected Media:

• Weaving Knowledge: Thinking, Feeling, and Making. (2019) Director, Cinematographer. 
• Metaphors of the Mind. (2019) Creator, Co-host. Interdisciplinary series on global representations of cognition, emotion, and mental states. 
• Annual Medicine Buddha Ceremony at Minh Dang Quang. (2018) Director, Cinematographer. The Jivaka Project: Buddhist Health and Healing.
• Urban Temples.(2018) Director, Editor. Short film of urban temples in Philadelphia.
• On Aging: Liao Jialun b. 1928 (2017) Director, Editor. Beijing, China.
• Osher (2013), Director, Videographer, Editor, Writer. Produced with Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. 
• The Vital Other: Integrative Medicine and India(2012), Director, Videographer, Editor, Writer. Produced with the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine, India. Official selection for the Salem Film Festival Mass Reality Check.