Francesca Bray
Professor
Social Anthropology
The University of Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Biography
Francesca Bray is a Professor of Social Anthropology
Research Interest
Research career working on the history of agriculture and of science, technology and medicine in China. After a wonderful year of ethnographic fieldwork, which I spent in Kelantan, Malaysia splashing through the mud of paddy-fields and learning from farmers how they negotiated the challenges of Green Revolution technology, I expanded my interests to anthropology and issues of rural development. More recently, through my interest in the macro- and micro-politics of everyday technologies (including food, housing, communications and hygiene), I have become involved in collaborative projects not only with anthropologists, historians and development studies specialists, but also with STS scholars, and I have just been elected President of the international Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).
Publications
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Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (Routledge, 2013
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Rice as Self: Food, History and Nation-Building in Japan and Malaysia (Goody Lecture 2014, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle):
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Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge, 2015):
