Richard Yu-Cheng Shih 施昱丞 received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 2024. Prior to joining RIH, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Richard’s scholarship integrates interdisciplinary methods from the Digital Humanities to explore environmental humanities in East Asia and the history of global medicine. Trained as a historian of modern China, his research focuses on human entanglement with riverine environments and their long-term consequences.

His current book manuscript situates the political economy of the modern Yangzi Delta (Jiangnan) within its ecological contexts, tracing how rising sea levels and other ENSO-driven tidal impacts have challenged local infrastructure and governance since 1850. Drawing on archival research, GIS mapping, and ethnographic fieldwork, the study highlights how the estuarine areas of Jiangnan—despite being a prosperous agricultural and cultural center in China for the past millennium—have transformed into vulnerable waterfronts afflicted by floods, diseases, and displacement, particularly among religious minorities.

This environmental shift also involves a wide range of wetland species, including birds, reeds, and fish, prompting a reexamination of Chinese modernity through the lens of interspecies relationships between humans and wildlife along the riverside. Part of this broader inquiry appears in his recent article, “Reeds, Snails, and Parasites: Schistosomiasis and Wetland Ecology in China’s Yangzi Delta from the 1870s to 1949.”(Environmental History 30, no. 3 [July 2025]: 444–465), available at https://doi.org/10.1086/735549.