School of Social and Political Science

Background

I began my research career working on the history of agriculture and of science, technology and medicine in China. After a wonderful year of ethnographic fieldwork, which I spent in Kelantan, Malaysia splashing through the mud of paddy-fields and learning from farmers how they negotiated the challenges of Green Revolution technology, I expanded my interests to anthropology and issues of rural development. More recently, through my interest in the macro- and micro-politics of everyday technologies (including food, housing, communications and hygiene), I have become involved in collaborative projects not only with anthropologists, historians and development studies specialists, but also with STS scholars, and I have recently served as President of the international Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).

At present I am working mainly on cropscapes and on food systems, with an interest in 'heritagisation' and the insights it suggests into how history is used. Currently I am co-editing (with German, Italian, Portuguese and Zimbabwean colleagues) the 3-volume Cambridge History of Technology. We are working with over a hundred contributors from around the world, bringing an anthropological approach to what technology is and does across time and place. We expect the first volume to appear in 2025. Other  research projects include: Making modernity in East Asia: technologies of everyday life, 19th - 21st centuries http://mmea.hku.hk/

Some recent publications

Francesca Bray and Barbara Hahn, 'The Goddess Technology is a polyglot', History and Technology, online publication April 2023.

Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History, Yale Agrarian Studies, Yale University Press, 2023. (Audio book; Chinese translation forthcoming, China Science and Technology Press.)

'Technology, gender, and nation: building modern citizens in Maoist China’, ch. 22 in Maja Hojer Bruun et al (eds), The Palgrace Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2022: 433-448.

Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand Year History, revised and expanded edition, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2021. (Chinese translation published by CITIC, 2023.)

‘Underground inspirations: tuber sciences and their histories’, History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture, Isis, 112, 3 (September 2021): 548-563.

Bray F., Clancey G. and Mamidipudi A. (2021) Introduction: Building Sites, Crafting Knowledge. HoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology, Vol.15 (Issue 2), pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.2478/host-2021-0010

‘Primer: Technology’, World History Commons, https://worldhistorycommons.org/primer-technology (2021)

‘The craft of mud-making: cropscapes, time and history’, 2019 da Vinci Address, Technology & Culture, 61, 1 (April 2020): 645-661.

‘Thinking with diagrams: the chaîne opératoire and the transmission of technical knowledge in Chinese agricultural texts’, EASTS 14, 2 (2020): 199-223.

‘Cropscapes and history: reflections on rootedness and mobility’, Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 9.1 (2019): 20-41.

Science and Confucian Statecraft in East Asia, ed. Francesca Bray and Jongtae Lim, Leiden, Brill 2019. https://brill-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/view/title/33365

‘Science cultures’, in Laura Grindstaff, Ming-Cheng Lo and John R. Hall (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2nd ed., 2019: 446-455. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Cultural-Sociology-2nd-Edition/Grindstaff-Lo-Hall/p/book/9781138288621

‘Feeding the farmers, feeding the nation: the Long Green Revolution in Kelantan, Malaysia’, in James L. Watson and Jakob Klein (eds), Handbook of Food and Anthropology, London: Bloomsbury, 2016: 173-199. http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-handbook-of-food-and-anthropology-9780857855947/

Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge, 2015): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rice-Global-Networks-New-Histories/dp/1107044391

Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (Routledge, 2013): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Technology-Gender-History-Imperial-China/dp/041563959X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435745053&sr=1-4

'Tools for virtuous action: technology, skills and ordinary ethics', in Charles Stafford (ed): Ordinary Ethics in China (LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology, 2013): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ordinary-Ethics-Monographs-Social-Anthropology/dp/0857854607