Michael Stanley-Baker

Michael Stanley-Baker serves as Assistant Professor of History and Medical Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, holding joint appointments in the School of Humanities and Lee Kong-Chian School of Medicine. As an historian of Chinese medicine and religion with clinical experience in Chinese medicine, he bridges academic scholarship and clinical practice.

His research focuses on the intersectionality of Chinese medicine across historical periods, examining both religious healers in the early Chinese empire and diverse stakeholders in the modern global diaspora. He specializes in Daoist medical traditions and the conceptual frameworks of Chinese medicine, particularly the role of qi in medical theory and practice.

His scholarly output includes significant editorial work, most notably as co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2022), where he contributed chapters on qi and Daoism. His research demonstrates consistent focus on the historical development of Chinese medical concepts and their religious contexts.

As President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM), he develops communication strategies and digital solutions to disseminate scholarship across the diverse fields comprising Asian Medicine. He currently serves as Principal Investigator for the Polyglot Asian Medicine project and is completing a monograph on medicine and religion as related genres of practice in China.

His work integrates traditional scholarship with digital humanities approaches, creating datasets and tools to study the migration of medical knowledge across spatio-temporal, intellectual and linguistic boundaries. This interdisciplinary methodology connects historical analysis with contemporary applications of traditional medical systems.