Department of History

Yewong is a cultural historian of early modern Tibet and China specializing in material culture studies, history of science and technology, and borderlands history. Her dissertation, titled, “Carvers and Print Workshops: The History of Tibetan-language Woodblock Printing Technology” historicizes the temporal and spatial development of Tibetan-language printing houses from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century across Tibet, Sino-Tibetan borderlands, and Buddhist spaces in Qing China.

Yewong investigates why monastic elites embraced woodblock printing, viewing it as a durable medium that could perpetuate “inexhaustible prints” of Buddhist knowledge. She demonstrates artisans’ deep knowledge of wood’s materiality and considers how concerns for posterity and permanence shaped their practices. Resisting colonial narratives of science and technology and progressive narratives of modernism, her work seeks to position Tibetan-language woodblock printing in the global history of print technology.

She works closely with museum collections on Tibetan materials and engages with the connected histories of colonialism and secularism in dealing with the collected objects. At Brown, Yewong will prepare her dissertation for publication as a book manuscript and will begin research for her second book project, which examines Tibetan Buddhist art production at the Imperial workshops of Beijing during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).