Trais Pearson, PhD
Selected Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
“Morbid Subjects: Forensic Medicine and Sovereignty in Siam,” Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (March 2018): 394-420. [AVAILABLE HERE].
“‘Womb with a View’: The Introduction of Western Obstetrics in Nineteenth Century Siam,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90, no. 1 (March 2016): 1-31. [AVAILABLE HERE].
“Treatise on Smallpox Vaccination by Dan Beach Bradley(1844)” (Annotated translation), Journal of the Siam Society 104 (2016): 147-168. [AVAILABLE HERE].
“Prefiguring ‘Pasteurization’?: Science, Society, and the Introduction of Vaccination to Siam,” Rian Thai: Journal of the Institute of Thai Studies 5 (Chulalongkorn University) (2012), pp. 1-30. [AVAILABLE HERE]
Chapters in Edited Volumes
"'DNA Evidence Cannot Lie': Forensic Science, Truth Regimes, and Civic Epistemology in Thai History," chapter 8 in Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin, eds., Global Forensic Cultures: Making Facts and Justice in the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), uses the controversial case of two Burmese migrant workers convicted of a double-murder in 2015 as an opportunity to explore the history of forensic expertise in relation to broader claims about truth and authority in Thai society.
Other Research Projects
My second planned book-length research project, tentatively titled Imperial Asylum: Madness in Modern Siam, was intended to challenge the traditional view of medicine as handmaiden to European empire. Even as the Siamese state underwent sweeping institutional reforms aimed at replicating the model of European colonial states in the region, mental illness and its medicine remained a uniquely indigenous affair. In investigating how madness and its medicine became a figurative “asylum” against imperial life over the course of the long nineteenth century (c. 1805-1932), the book project pursued the question of responsibility for the mad across a number of legal, social, and institutional sites, from Buddhist temples to “lunatic asylums” to the laboring community of transnational sex workers.
Research Support
I am grateful to have enjoyed generous support from several sources over the course of my graduate studies and as a contingent faculty member. In addition to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, my research has been supported by the Institute for International Education (IIE), the National Science Foundation (STS), the Institute of Thai Studies at Chulalongkorn University, and the University Research Council, Boston College. Advanced training in the Thai language in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, SEASSI, and AST was supported by the U.S. Department of Education's FLAS Funding Program.