Michael Stanley-Baker

Michael Stanley-Baker (徐源) is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Nanyang Technological University, specializing in the history of Chinese medicine and religion, particularly Daoism. He also serves as an associate of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanities and as treasurer on the council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines.

Stanley-Baker received his PhD from University College London and holds a clinical degree in Chinese medicine from Ruseto College, Boulder CO. His academic journey includes work and study at Indiana University, Bloomington; Academia Sinica, Taipei; and the Needham Institute, Cambridge. He has conducted extensive fieldwork with healers in Taiwan and China, bridging scholarly and clinical perspectives.

His research focuses on the intersection of religion, medicine, and science in Chinese history, with particular emphasis on Daoist healing practices and the circulation of medical knowledge. He employs innovative digital humanities methods to analyze historical medical texts, creating tools like the Polyglot Asian Medicine Knowledge Graph System and the DAOBUDMED6D corpus for studying Six Dynasties medical, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

His recent publications reveal a growing emphasis on transnational medical exchanges, the historical geography of drugs, and the political dimensions of medical knowledge. Stanley-Baker's work challenges conventional boundaries between 'medicine' and 'religion,' arguing for more nuanced understandings of how healing knowledge was organized and transmitted in pre-modern contexts.

• International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicines Council Member
• Lead developer of Polyglot Asian Medicine digital project
• Co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

Stanley-Baker directs the 'Drugs across Asia' digital humanities project, which creates new tools for analyzing pharmacological knowledge in Asian historical texts. His work combines traditional philological approaches with cutting-edge digital methods, facilitating large-scale analysis of drug references across religious and medical canons. His research has important implications for understanding how medical knowledge circulated across cultural and political boundaries in pre-modern Asia.