I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2019 and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University. I have published articles in major scholarly journals, including Isis (the official journal of the History of Science Society), Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming), and the British Journal for the History of Science. Additionally, I have book chapters forthcoming in volumes published by Routledge and the University of Pittsburgh Press. I have also been invited to evaluate manuscripts for Isis (March 2024) and other scholarly journals spanning disciplines such as history, history of science, political science, and international relations.

     My book project, Darwin in China, is currently under review at Oxford University Press. To map the circulation of knowledge, either on a grand scale from east to west, or south to north, or on more personalized levels across national borders and through different social groups, has much to tell us about the impact of science and the extent of its universalizing properties. This project explores the adoption of Darwinism in China as a contribution to such studies, aiming to show not only those elements of Darwin’s intellectual system that were modified by Chinese thinkers, but also the fascinating story of the many other evolutionary ideas that were synthesized with local principles, sometimes abandoned, often drawing on non-Darwinian ideas, and always relating in important ways to the changing political context from the years characterized by the “Self-Strengthening Movement” of the Qing Dynasty to the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937. I illustrate how historians can study the global circulation of scientific knowledge by deploying prosopograhical techniques and close textual analysis; not least, I intend to show the co-constitution of science and society, and a commitment to the concept that all science has social meaning. My account of the influence of social Darwinism and Hugo de Vries’s mutationism aims to develop a new perspective of the rise of Marxism in China.

Contact me: jinxiaoxing@gmail.com; xjin1@alumni.nd.edu; Tel.: 6172515859.