Shan Huang

Huang is a historian of material culture and sensory experience in medieval and early modern Asia, with a particular focus on the entangled histories of trade, religion, and science across the Silk Road. 

Her research explores how commodities—especially aromatic substances such as musk—shaped knowledge systems, commercial practices, and cross-cultural encounters from China to the Islamic world and beyond. She is particularly interested in how scent, as a sensory and material category, operated within shifting regimes of value, authority, and embodied meaning.

Her current project examines the social and intellectual lives of musk, an animal-derived perfume extracted from the musk deer and circulated across Eurasian markets. Tracing musk through imperial pharmacopoeias, Buddhist and Islamic ritual manuals, merchant records, and medical texts, she analyzes how this olfactory substance became enmeshed in ethical, religious, and political discourses across the medieval and premodern periods. By placing sensory perception at the center of historical inquiry, her work contributes to ongoing conversations in the history of science and medicine, sensory studies, and global history.

In addition to musk, her broader research interests include the sensory politics of aphrodisiac, healing substances, cross-cultural medical exchanges, and the material culture of religion along transregional networks. She draws on a multilingual archive—spanning Chinese, Tibetan, Arabic, and Persian sources—and engages with methodologies from art history, philology, and the history of the body.

Huang has a particular interest in the Dunhuang corpus and its insights into the sensory dimensions of Buddhist practice and commerce. Her work aims to bridge regional studies with global and theoretical approaches, foregrounding the affective, ephemeral, and embodied aspects of historical experience. She is committed to interdisciplinary scholarship and is actively involved in collaborative research on the Silk Road's multisensory past.

Authored Book: Born to Wine (2014) and The Great Plunder: How China lost its Treasure in the 19th and 20th centuries (2025)

• Medieval and Early Modern Asia
• Sensory History, with a focus on olfaction and material culture
• Buddhist and interreligious exchanges across Inner Asia
• Dunhuang studies and Silk Road networks
• History of science and medicine
• Cross-cultural medical knowledge transmission in the premodern world

A Pair of Male Ducks: Traces of Queerness in Jin Dynasty China