Staff profile

Sare Aricanli is a historian of early modern and modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of science and medicine, as well as China’s place in a globalising world. She is interested in questions of ritual, text, gender, the human–animal ‘divide’, and state–society relations.

Sare’s published work has covered the history of Chinese state medicine, the incorporation of ‘Mongolian’ methods of equine care and management into Qing state practice, as well as the textual transmission of medical knowledge in and beyond East Asia. Her work explores different cultural registers in the Qing, including the role of the Manchu language. She has traced broader connectivities through the study of medical figures, from Gong Tingxian in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries to Ida Kahn in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries.

Sare is currently completing a book with the tentative title Medicine and the State: Pluralities, Negotiation, and Knowledge Exchange in China over the Long Eighteenth Century, showing the extent to which state medicine in early modern China was political, multicultural, and part of the globalising early modern world. Situating state medicine within its broader political and cultural contexts, she reveals the range of medical and non-medical actors whose involvement in political processes as well as cultural and knowledge exchanges shaped (state) medicine in Qing China.

Sare holds Masters degrees from both the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and from Princeton University, where she also completed her doctorate. Prior to joining Durham University, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the China Scholarship Council and a Fulbright-Hays IIE Fellowship. Her interest in material and visual culture has resulted in collaborations with the British Museum and Durham University’s Oriental Museum. 

Sare is happy to supervise postgraduates working on the history of China (from the long 14^th century to the end of the Qing dynasty), especially subjects in the history of medicine, the history of science, the economic and cultural history of material culture as well as topics in cultural and political history of early modern China.

• history of medicine
• history of science
• ritual
• text

Chapter in book

• Aricanli, S. (2023). Ida Kahn: Medical Leader and Missionary. In Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796-1912 (326-329). British Museum
• Aricanli, S. (2018). Reconsidering the Boundaries: Multicultural and Multilingual Perspectives on the Care and Management of the Emperors' Horses in the Qing. In R. Sterckx, M. Siebert, & E. Dagmar Schaefer (Eds.), Animals through Chinese history : earliest times to 1911 (199-216). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108551571.012

Journal Article

• Aricanli, S. (2022). Continuities in State-Society Interactions across Broad Spatio-temporal Realms: Gong Tingxian as Both an Author of Popular Medical Texts and an Imperial Medical Secretary in Early Modern China. Social History of Medicine, 35(1), 302-322. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab036
• Aricanli, S. (2014). Plurality in Qing Imperial Medicine: Examining Institutional Formations beyond the Imperial Medical Bureau. Asia Pacific: perspectives (San Francisco, Calif.), 12(1), 61-83