Postdoctoral Fellow
Genie Yoo is a historian of island Southeast Asia, working at the intersection of history of science, medicine, environmental history, philology, and religion. Her research focuses on the history of cross-cultural interactions on one of the most important spice islands in Indonesia, called Ambon. Using European and indigenous sources, her dissertation traced how imperial and indigenous understandings of nature–in relation to forests and fields of cultivation, colonial botany, medicinal recipes, and Islamic practices–depended on multi-scalar and cross-cultural information networks between islands and regions, and how natural knowledge changed across shifting boundaries of science, medicine, and religion from early modern to modern times. As a postdoctoral fellow for the Sawyer Seminar, she plans to expand this work to explore early modern connections between slavery, ethnic formation, medicinal knowledge, and understandings of nature in Indonesia’s spice-producing islands, particularly in Ambon and Banda. Prior to arriving in Bloomington, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for a European Research Council Project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in Fall 2022.
