Victor Seow honored for early-career excellence in history of science

Victor Seow, Ph.D. ’14, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, has received the Sarton Prize for the History of Science. The award, established by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, recognizes his “exceptional promise and distinguished accomplishments as an emerging scholar in the field.”

“The history of science is filled with forgotten experiments, overlooked ideas, and uncredited labor,” Seow said. “That my own work — built upon the scholarship of many folks who came before me — is being recognized in this way is an incredible honor. I am grateful to the academy and to everyone who has helped me along in my journey.”

Seow, who joined the Department of the History of Science in 2017, specializes in the history of technology, science, and industry, focusing on China and Japan in their global contexts. He is the author of “Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia” (2022), a book that examines the interplay of energy and politics through the history of the region’s former Coal Capital, Fushun. 

Fushun’s enormous coal mine, once the largest in East Asia, was opened by Chinese merchants at the turn of the 20th century before being developed under successive imperial Japanese, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist regimes. Its story points to shared fantasies of intensive fossil-fuel extraction that were realized at great human and environmental cost. “Carbon Technocracy” racked up multiple honors, including the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States’ Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History.

“Victor Seow’s exploration of energy, industry, and politics in modern East Asia bridges disciplines and fosters a deeper understanding of the historical forces that shape science, technology, and society,” Academy President Laurie L. Patton said in a statement.

Seow, a native of Singapore, is now at work on his next book, currently titled “The Human Factor: A History of Science, Work, and the Politics of Production.” By looking at industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to today, this book asks how and to what ends work becomes and functions as a subject of scientific inquiry. As part of his research for this project, Seow recently earned a master’s in industrial and organizational psychology through the Harvard Extension School. He founded the Harvard University Asia Center’s Science and Technology in Asia seminar series in 2018 and has been hosting it since.

The Sarton Prize was established by writer and academy member May Sarton in honor of her father: the chemist, historian, and onetime Harvard professor George Sarton, who is considered the founder of history of science as an independent field of study.