Francesca Bray

Professor of Social Anthropology, The University of Edinburgh. Francesca Bray is a historian of science, technology and medicine in imperial China, trained in Chinese studies and anthropology. As an anthropologist, Bray is fascinated by the macro- and micro-politics of technologies, past and present. She has specifically looked at how technology has expressed and shaped gender roles throughout Chinese history. In Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997) and Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China (2013), Bray demonstrates how gender principles were woven into the very fabric of the Chinese empire, from cosmology and ideologies of rule to the material foundations of the state and the everyday practices of the domestic sphere.

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