Robert Perrins, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of History & Classics
Vice President Academic
Phone: (902) 585-1782
Email: robert.perrins@acadiau.ca
Research Interests
My doctoral research examined the urban and social history of the Manchurian port city of Dalian during the period of the Japanese occupation of the Liaodong leasehold in Northeast China (1905-1945). This work and subsequent research have explored issues surrounding the issues of migration, colonial governance, labor relations, and the construction of identity.
Over the past several years my research work has focused on the histories of disease and medicine in northeastern China, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century. This work has been supported by grants from the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, and has involved extensive archival and field research in the People’s Republic of China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In particular this research has focused on issues surrounding the development of public health, the education of physicians and medical researchers, livestock diseases and veterinary medicine, and outbreaks of contagious diseases such as plague, cholera, influenza and tuberculosis.
I am also interested in contemporary issues surrounding labor migration in the People’s Republic of China, as well as the PRC’s relationship with overseas Chinese communities.
Selected Publications
China Facts and Figures Annual. Volume 24-30 (Gulf Breeze: Florida: Academic International Press, 1999-2005).
Health, Illness and Disease. Edited with Peter Twohig. (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2008).
"For God, Emperor and Science: Competing Visions of the Hospital in Manchuria, 1910-1945.” In From Western Medicine to Global Medicine: The Hospital Beyond the West, eds. Mark Harrison, Margaret Jones and Helen Sweet (London and New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008).
"Imagining Disease and Negotiating Hygiene: The Worries of an American Consul on the Border of the Japanese Empire.” In Health, Illness and Disease, eds. Peter Twohig and Robert Perrins (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2008).
“Doctors, Disease and Development: Engineering Colonial Public Health in Southern Manchuria, 1905-1931,” in Building a Modern Nation: Science, Technology and Medicine in Japan, ed. Morris Low, 103-32 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
“Diguozhuyi zai Hua zujiedi yu Dalian chengshi fazhan yanji (1905-1931),” (A Study of the Imperialist Leaseholds in China and the Urban Development of Dalian, 1905-1931), Dalian Jiaoyu Xueyuan Xuebao (Journal of the Dalian Education University) 20:3 (2004): 68-72.