As a historian of visual culture and media technologies, I am deeply interested in how empirical science, since the English Enlightenment, has utilized visual forms to represent evidential data. The 19th century stands as a particularly crucial moment for this inquiry. While the invention of photography radically strengthened the mimetic quality of what could be considered physical evidence, the concurrent "Golden Age" of statistical graphics also challenged society to conceptualize evidence and data in increasingly abstract forms.

While colonial administrators relied on the concrete, mimetic precision of the camera lens to document territories and classify human bodies, they simultaneously used the abstract logic of data graphics, maps, and medical statistics to collapse vast geographies into manageable, bureaucratic narratives. I am fascinated by how imperial power operated precisely at this intersection and what this tension means for the relationship between human perception and modes of governance.

Beyond media technology, my research investigates the deeply entangled reproductive politics of Chinese immigration and botanical cultivation since the nineteenth century, where population science, eugenic desiers, and biotic control intersect. This comparative and interdisciplinary framework allows me to analyze the moral and existential panic surrounding the sexual reproduction of racialized others alongside the proliferation of alien seeds in a colonized world.

Below are some select projects that I have been working on.