Staff profile

Yifan Song is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, funded by Durham's Environmental Humanities Doctoral Scholarship. His research begins with a fascination with the ways people have sought to understand an ever-changing atmosphere. Focusing on meteorology and weather modification in Maoist China, his work explores how weather knowledge was created through encounters between scientific expertise, local practices, and socialist visions of environmental transformation. Beyond institutional histories of science, he is interested in atmospheric knowledge and cultural practices at the margins—the overlooked ways in which people observed, interpreted, and lived with the atmosphere. Through these histories, he asks how alternative understandings of the atmosphere might help us rethink the politics of weather and climate in the twentieth century and beyond.

• History of Environment and Science in Modern China