Hansun Hsiung

Hansun Hsiung is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. His work integrates methods from book history and the history of science to explore the global co-production of knowledge, particularly focusing on print networks between Japan and Western Europe from 1750 to 1900. His research highlights the roles of missionaries, opium smugglers, pirate publishers, and samurai-scholars in shaping modern Western knowledge systems.

Current projects include the book manuscript Learn Anything!: Cheap Pedagogical Print and the Education of the Modern World and an edited volume on the role of "compression" in communication and information management. He is also developing a monograph on the prehistory of stock image banks. His research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the Fulbright Program, and the Mellon Foundation.

Hsiung holds a PhD from Harvard University (2016) and has previously trained at Yale and the University of Tokyo. His interdisciplinary approach bridges humanistic and social sciences, with a focus on transnational knowledge systems and digital humanities.