Professor Vivienne Lo

On sabbatical leave: 2023/24

Vivienne Lo is a Professor in the department of History and the convenor of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanity. She also teaches the Ancient and Medieval history of China and has specialist modules in the History of Asian Medicine and Classical Chinese medicine at BSc and MA.

Vivienne's core research concerns the social and cultural origins of acupuncture, therapeutic exercise, and food and medicine. She translates and analyses manuscript material from Early and Medieval China, and publishes on the transmission of scientific knowledge along the so-called Silk Roads. She has a long-term interest in visual cultures of medicine and healthcare. Current projects include a history nutrition in China.

PhD supervision

Current students: Penelope Barrett; Deborah Woolf; Li Xiaolin; Ding Jiashuo
Recently completed: Wang Nashuyuan; Zhou Dangwei; Christina Lee (KCL); Yang Yi; Marianne Datiles (SoP): Luis Fernando Bernadi Junqueira

Major publications

• With Chris Berry and Guo Liping: Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities (London: Routledge, publication date November 2019). Available as e-book.
• With Penelope Barrett: Imagining Chinese Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Available as e-book.
• With Christopher Cullen: Medieval Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2005)
• Perfect Bodies: Sports Medicine and Immortality (London: British Museum Research Publications, 2012)
• How to do the Gibbon Walk: A Translation of the Pulling Book (c.186 BCE) (Cambridge: NRI, 2014). Available as an e-book.
• With Stanley-Baker, M. S. B. (Eds.). (2022). Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine. London: Routledge. Available as e-book. 

For a full list of publications, see Vivienne's Iris profile.

Grants/projects

Wellcome Seed Award 2017-18: China and the Cross-Cultural Humanities

Teaching

• Ancient and Medieval China
• History of Asian Medicine (second- and third-year undergraduate advanced seminar course)
• Classical Chinese Medicine (MA-level elective module)
• An Interdisciplinary Approach to Chinese Health and Humanity (MA Chinese Health and Humanity core course)
• Chinese Film and the Body (MA Chinese Health and Humanity elective course)
• A History and Ethnopharmacology of Chinese Nutrition