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Hilary smiling

Hilary A. Smith

Professor; Chair

hilary.smith@du.edu

303-871-2953 (Office)

https://udenver.academia.edu/HSmith

Personal

Sturm Hall, 2000 East Asbury Avenue Denver, CO 80208

What I do

I study Chinese history and the history of science and medicine. Classes I teach include Imperial China, Modern China, Comparative History of Medicine, Disease in World History, Food in East Asian History, and Chinese Science. I am also Senior Editor for the journal Asian Medicine.

Professional Biography

Before coming to DU, I earned degrees in the history of science from Cambridge University (M.Phil.) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.), and taught at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In my teaching and research, I examine how people living in very different times and cultures from our own made sense of the natural world, including their own bodies. Studying those unfamiliar perspectives can help us understand what’s peculiar about our own views, and appreciate how social, intellectual, and political circumstances inform all knowledge, even modern scientific and medical knowledge.

Degree(s)

  • Ph.D., History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2008
  • MA, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2004
  • M.Phil., History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, 2000
  • AB, Religion, Princeton University, 1998

Licensure / Accreditations

  • Certificate in College and University Teaching

Media Sources

Research

I am currently researching how ideas about ​healthy aging and longevity have changed over time in East Asian communities.

My 2026 book, Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference into Sickness in China (Johns Hopkins University Press), examines the history of how nutrition science has pathologized Chinese foodways and bodies. It analyzes the development of ideas about things like animal-protein deficiency, lactose intolerance, and the so-called "Asian flush" response to alcohol, and argues that imperialist hubris, national aspirations and the profit motive joined forces to create these supposed inadequacies.

My first book, Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford, 2017), explored how Chinese understandings of disease changed between the fourth century AD and the present.

Key Projects

  • Making Modern Diets: Science and Sustenance in Republican China

Featured Publications

Smith, Hilary A. “Absorbing Vitamins: How a Nutritional Paradigm Was Reinvented in Republican China.” In Modern Chinese Foodways. 89-108 Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 2025.
Eddy, Jared J., Hilary A. Smith, and Jeanne E. Abrams. “Historical Lessons on Vaccine Hesitancy: Smallpox, Polio, and Measles, and Implications for COVID-19.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 66, no. 1, (2023): 145-59.
Smith, Hilary A. “Good Food, Bad Bodies: Milk Culture and Lactose Intolerance in China.” In Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia. edited by edited by Angela Ki Che Leung, Melissa L. Caldwell, Robert Ji-Song Ku, and Christine R. Yano. 262-84 Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. 2019.

Presentations

Smith, Hilary A. “Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference into Sickness in China” Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Noon Lecture Series, Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan, 2025.
Smith, Hilary A. “Science and Nation: How Early Twentieth-Century Nutrition Scientists Looked at Chinese Diets” Technological Knowledge, Information Circulation, and Moral Order in China, Late 16th to Early 20th Century, Changsha, People’s Republic of China (virtual), Hunan University, Yuelu Academy, 2024.
Smith, Hilary A. “The Pandemic Stress Test: A Historical Perspective on Moving Forward in the Age of COVID-19” STAT (Seeking Tomorrow’s Answers Together), Denver, CO, University of Denver, 2022.
Smith, Hilary A. “Historical Lessons about How Epidemics End, Or Don’t” Department of Medicine Grand Rounds, (virtual), UCSD School of Medicine, 2021.
Smith, Hilary A. “The Well Nourished Nation: Reconsidering Healthy and Pathological Eating in Early Twentieth-Century China” Workshop on Modern Overseas Chinese, Medicine, Health and Disease, Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, 2020.
Smith, Hilary A. “Vitamins, Chinese Dietetics, and Modern Nutritional Knowledge” Ma Kanwen Memorial Lecture, Cambridge, England, Needham Research Institute, 2020.
Smith, Hilary A. “The Chinese Calorie: Nutrition Science in Early Twentieth-Century China” History of Modern Medicine Seminar, Cambridge, England, History and Philosophy of Science Department, Cambridge University, 2020.
Smith, Hilary A. “How Modern Translations of Traditional Disease Names Distort Their Meanings: The Example of Jiaoqi” International Congress on Traditional Asian Medicines, Kiel, Germany, 2017.
Smith, Hilary A. “Hunger As a Medical Problem: Changes in Concepts of Nutrition in Chinese Medicine” New Problems and Methodologies in the History of Medicine in East Asia, Tokyo, Japan, University of Tokyo, 2016.
Smith, Hilary A. “Origins of ’Intolerance’: Lactose and Changing Ideas about Dietary Difference in Modern China” International Conference on Food and Health, Hong Kong, China, University of Hong Kong, 2014.

Awards

  • Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award, U.S. State Department, Institute of International Education, Foundation for Scholarly Exchange (Taiwan)
  • Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation US Scholar Grant, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (Taiwan)
  • Jing Brand Scholarship in Chinese Science and Civilisation, Needham Research Institute (UK)