Ya-Wen Ku

During the second half of the 1990s, I came across “environmental history” on a postgraduate course. It was my first time hearing this term, which caught my attention immediately. I noticed that the demand for interdisciplinary approaches of environmental history suits a person just like me, who “ignores his/her proper occupation” and likes to take various courses at university. Since then, I groped in the dark to find the meanings of all the words I got in the class: “environmental history is not about the history of the environment, but about the interaction between humans and the environment,” reviewing all the subjects of concern from the perspective of environmental history. So far, I have two orientations of my research subjects: 1. history of diseases, medical care, and medical herbs; 2. history and culture of water. In recent years, I have been focusing on the latter. I walked into the fields and dig out the materials to understand how people in different space-times and with various backgrounds comprehended, used, and managed water in terms of living with or challenging it in the history of Taiwan. I am eager to learn unique insights, research methods, and tools from other disciplines, hoping to find novel historical narrative perspectives.

Email: yawenku@gate.sinica.edu.tw