Shigehisa Kuriyama 栗山茂久
Collaborator
Harvard University
Working group: Global Synergie/Asynergies
Shigehisa Kuriyama received his A.B. degree from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1977 and an A.M. degree in 1978. After completing acupuncture studies in Tokyo, he entered Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, which awarded him a Ph.D. in 1986. He joined the Harvard faculty as Reischauer Professor in 2005 after previously working at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan. Kuriyama’s research explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). His book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999), received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and Korean. His current projects include studies on 1) the primacy of forgetfulness in the rise of modern medicine; 2) the unsuspected legacy of ancient riddles in the contemporary experience of pleasure; and 3) pictures of happy ordinary places.