About

Yulia Frumer is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the role of cognition and emotions in technological decision-making, exploring the material and metaphorical bases for abstract thought, and analyzing design bias. Specializing in East Asian, particularly Japanese, science and technology, she traces developments from the Tokugawa period to the 21st century across various scientific disciplines such as astronomy, navigation, and engineering. Her work examines objects like clocks, thermometers, compasses, industrial robotic arms, prosthetics, robotic pets, and androids, emphasizing how biases become embedded in technological objects through diachronic analysis. Frumer advocates for engaged scholarship, believing that understanding the historical development of technologies can inform just and unbiased future design.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Literature
• Art
• Economics
• Management
• Mechanical engineering
• History
• Ancient history
• Law
• Human–computer interaction
• Archaeology
• Programming language
• World Wide Web
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Feeling Machines: Japanese Robotics and the Global Entanglements of More-Than-Human Care

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2026-05-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Teaching Human Agency in Science through Japanese History

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2024-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• The Politics of <i>Mise-en-Scène</i> Technologies

  East Asian Science Technology and Society An International Journal · 2024-04-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scientific Communities and the Emergence of <i>Science</i> in Early Modern Japan

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Tokugawa period saw a transformation in the systematic inquiry into nature. In the seventeenth century scholars were engaging in discrete fields of study, such as astronomy or medicine. But over the course of the next two centuries the fields that initially seemed distant and unrelated gradually converged into one enterprise that we now call “science.” Although Japanese scholars were not isolated from European science, it was not the outside influence that caused this transformation. Rather, the new conceptualization of science came from within, as different scholars came to align themselves along different lines. What brought them together was no longer social status, practical goals, or even their respective disciplines, but the kind of questions they asked, the kind of evidence they considered acceptable, and the sources they deemed authoritative. Together, they now engaged in Science, with a capital S, that was greater than the sum of its parts.

  PublisherDOI

• Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland by Ruth Rogaski

  Bulletin of the history of medicine · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Literature
  • Ancient history

  Reviewed by: Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland by Ruth Rogaski Yulia Frumer Ruth Rogaski. Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. viii + 454 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-226-80965-6). Knowing Manchuria is a journey into a mysterious frontier—lands bounded by mighty rivers, vanishing mountains, and delicate flowers, and traversed by death, disease, and desolation. By inviting the reader to join exiles, chroniclers, naturalists, surveyors, medics, and the author herself, the book opens the door to the landscape of knowing. Describing historical actors’ experience of the multilayered environments they’ve encountered, Rogaski shows how “different modes of deploying the human senses” (p. 14) produced knowledge of the region we now know as Manchuria. Spanning almost four hundred years, the collective travelogue relies on a variety of source, the most curious of which are poems, written by people of different statuses and ethnicities. Poems, according to Rogaski, reflect a “kinesthetic sense of encounter” (p. 33) by allowing the reader to experience how it felt to be immersed in particular environments. Together with Rogaski, we follow a seventeenth-century poet, Wu Zhaoqian, exiled by the Qing into an imposing and imposed-upon environment “without names, without categories, without history” (p. 51). We join the entourage of the Kangxi emperor on his quest to find ancestral dragons, and experience the journey simultaneously through the politicized chronicling of the emperor’s scholarly secretary, Gao Shiqi, and the detached measurements of the Jesuit astronomer, Ferdinand Verbiest. Rogaski leads us on an absurd mission to find a hidden mountain, and we accompany a local forager, Aesun, whose skills allowed him to see and know things that escaped the eighteenth century learned Chosŏn surveying expedition. In the nineteenth century, we trail Karl Maximowicz, a Baltic-German botanist in the service of the Russian empire. Thrown into the area by global political turmoil, Maximowicz took advantage of his misfortune to collect, dissect, categorize, and attach his name to plants unknown to him but well-known to the local population. While grim political realities framed the [End Page 160] dynamics of knowing through the book, the chapter on multi-national investigation of fossils of Jehol turns even darker—literally—showing how a knowledge of fossils informed the exploitation of coal resources and of local communities forced to toil in coal mines. We are then reminded of a different kind of “entanglement of the human and non-human environments” (p. 232)—the occupation of the human host by a deadly plague bacillus. If earlier in the book the encounter with rivers, mountains, and flowers feels romantic—even if harsh—chapters six and seven describe the ghastly work of identifying deadly disease. Following the work of Cambridge trained Chinese doctor Wu Lien-teh, the Japanese medics in the infamous 731 unit that conducted human experimentation for the purpose of developing bioweapons, and the Maoist scientists who sought to redeem the region from denigrating label of “plagueland,” Rogaski shows that even within the seemingly same mode of inquiry individual perspectives produced different kinds of knowledge. The book ends with an exploration of knowing by means of labor—labor with newfangled machines, labor with bare hands, labor that leaves traces of fertile soil on human bodies. Together, these episodes show how the object and the objective of seeing/knowing determines the ways of knowing. They also reveal that environments circumscribe the bodily skills necessary for knowing and that the same landscape conceals multiple environments. Finally, the chapters show that even the same people—like the Russian botanist Karl Maximowicz or the Japanese mining specialist Yamagata Miyuki—are able to see and know things differently when they look for different things and employ a different sensorium. Throughout the book, Rogaski generously names multiple scholars who worked on intertwining histories of knowledge, environment, and bodies. Readers interested in Wu Lien Teh’s work on plague will find more information in Wayne Soon’s Global Medicine in China,1 and those with further interests in the politics of field explorations will benefit from Miriam Kadia’s Into the Field.2 Those inspired to know...

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• Manufacturing hands: robot fingers and human labour in post-war Japan

  History and Technology · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  This article argues that automation engineering in 1960s Japan was rooted in colonial attitudes towards human labour, which were tacitly present in Japan even decades after its defeat in World War II. I make this argument by examining the development of Japan’s first modern robot, a three-fingered mechanical hand designed by Tokyo University graduate student Yamashita Tadashi in 1963. Exploring Yamashita’s methods, the data he relied on, and the literature he drew inspiration from reveals that his design was modelled on human hands. Yamashita and his contemporaries were influenced by colonial assumptions about labour. Specifically, they accepted a tacit division of workers into two kinds: the engaged and cherished Japanese citizen; and the hardy, silent, colonial subject to whom fell the most dangerous and undesirable work. As Yamashita worked to make an autonomous and versatile robot, he recast its image as an engaged and cherished worker, paving the way for the Japanese reconceptualization of robots as friends. Retracing Yamashita’s process of making a robotic hand thus reveals that the automation of labour is predicated on the perceptions of humans whose labour robots are intended to replace.

  PublisherDOI

• Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan by Miriam Kingsberg Kadia

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan by Miriam Kingsberg Kadia Yulia Frumer (bio) Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan. By Miriam Kingsberg Kadia. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2020. xiv, 344 pages. $90.00, cloth; $30.00, paper; $26.49, E-book. It is no secret that one's judgment of others betrays an underlying self-reflection. The notion of "the Other" contains an implicit comparison with "the Self." In fact, the very existence of "the Other" is required to delineate an idealized vision of "the Self." In Into the Field, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia explores how the studies of "others" by Japanese scholars shaped—and were shaped by—the changing Japanese understanding of national identity. Over the course of the twentieth century, Japanese human scientists analyzed selected groups of people in a way that reflected contemporaneous understanding of Japan itself. In the wartime period, they studied remote tribes in Mongolia and New Guinea, while in the postwar period they turned their gaze to the Ainu, the Nikkei in Brazil, and the pre-Columbian cultures of the Andes. The focus on the other, the methodology, and even many of their conclusions were rather similar across different periods discussed in the book. But during earlier periods these conclusions backed the idealistic vision of Japan as a leader of Asian nations whose destiny was to lift others up from their backwardness; [End Page 205] in the postwar period, on the other hand, these same conclusions supported the nascent theories of Japanese uniqueness (Nihonjinron) and were used to contrast emergent images of Japan as a peace-loving, hard-working, and quick-to-modernize nation. The intriguing premise of the book is that Japan's human scientists of the early twentieth century were deeply entrenched in national identity politics all while claiming to maintain the highest standards of scientific objectivity. In fact, as Kadia shows, putting scientific objectivity on a pedestal was precisely what enabled Japanese researchers to legitimize Japan's imperial expansion. As we read in Into the Field, wrapping one's assumptions about the "innate" nature of different peoples in the veil of an "impartial view from nowhere" endowed early twentieth-century scientists with weighty authority. Critiquing the notion of objectivity, Kadia relies on the seminal study Objectivity (MIT Press, 2007) by historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison. Daston and Gallison explore the history of the notion itself—how the idea of objectivity was constructed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Into the Field builds on Objectivity in showing how particular notions of scientific objectivity were constructed in early twentieth-century Japanese human sciences. Into the Field also explains why a rhetoric of objectivity was prevalent in wartime Japan across various scholarly disciplines. (See, for example, William Tsutsui's Manufacturing Ideology [Princeton University Press, 1998].) According to Kadia, Japanese scholars, isolated from the global scientific community due to imperialist policies, had no choice but to forge ties with scholars of other disciplines within Japan, spreading and sharing concepts and methodologies. Yet the main focus of the book is the role the notion of objectivity played in the formation of the discipline of anthropology in Japan—first as a foundational principle, and later, in the 1960s and the 1970s, as a dangerous illusion to expose and eliminate. This focus allows Kadia to make a unique contribution to the history of Japanese social sciences. There is already a substantial body of scholarship that analyzes receptions of evolutionary theory.1 Another subset of scholarship explores the history of Japanese folklore studies.2 Into the Field, on the other hand, explores the development of [End Page 206] scholarly fields that study selected groups of people—collectively known as "human sciences"—into distinct academic disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology. In charting the formation of human sciences (jinrui kagaku) in Japan, Into the Field follows the life of a pivotal figure in the nascent discipline—Izumi Seiichi (1915–70). Izumi is a fascinating figure who grew up in Japanoccupied Korea and for whom, as Kadia notes, Japan was more of an "other" than Korea. The chapters of the book follow Izumi's research projects, from his first research...

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• Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve by Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin

  Technology and Culture · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve by Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin Yulia Frumer (bio) Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve By Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin. Cham: Springer, 2020. Pp. 121. The past two decades have seen a flurry of activity in the Artificial Life, or ALife, community, where data analysts, bio-engineers, and roboticists come together in their quest to apply biological principles to the construction of intelligent systems. Rise of the Self-Replicators is written by two members of the ALife community, data scientists Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin. The authors' ultimate career targets are futuristic: to explore whether it is possible to create a mechanism that can reproduce and evolve, and to examine the implications of such technological development. Their motive for writing this book, however, is to show that ideas about self-replicating machines are not novel, but have at least a 400-year history. Their goal is "to provide a chronological survey and a comprehensive archive" of all different contributors to the body of ideas about self-replicating machines, including philosophers, fiction writers, and scientists. Surveying references to artificial entities capable of reproduction from the seventeenth century to the present, Taylor and Dorin identify three evolutionary stages. First, according to the authors, in the seventeenth century, people came to think of animals as machines, which lead to musings about machines that could reproduce. Then, in the nineteenth century, evolutionary theories inspired the idea that one day machines may be able not only to reproduce but also to evolve. Finally, in the 1940s and 50s, automation of the manufacturing sector created fertile ground for the emergence of an idea of, and some actual attempts to realize, what the authors call the "evo-maker-replicator"—an artificial entity able to reproduce while constantly introducing design improvements to its "offspring." In the final chapter of the book, Taylor and Dorin categorize the surveyed sources into identifiable tropes, hopes, and fears, as well as goals for exploring self-replicators—scientific, commercial, and sociological (p. 89). They then discuss what they consider to be either lacunae or productive directions in the writings of past thinkers. The book ends with a discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of evo-replicators, as well as their possible future technological uses, especially for "space exploitation and exploration" (p. 100). The book is commendable for its comprehensiveness in surveying ideas about self-replicating machines in fiction, philosophy, and experimental science in Europe and the United States. Going beyond well-known figures, such as Descartes, Butler, Čapek, and von Neumann, the book also covers lesser-known yet no less fascinating individuals like Nils Aall Barricelli, who performed computer experiments on self-reproduction, or philosophically inclined Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov. In [End Page 1274] addition to describing historical sources and summarizing their ideas, the authors offer full-text, translated quotations, which makes the book an extremely useful reference source for studying artificial life philosophy that focuses on self-replication. Priced at almost $100, the book isn't readily accessible to resource-starved academics, let alone students. However, it is possible to request a free author-formatted PDF through the accompanying website (www.tim.taylor.com/selfrepbook). Rise of the Self-Replicators is undoubtedly exciting and inspirational for its primary audience—fellow members of the ALife community—as well as for philosophers, science fiction enthusiasts, and futurists. Historians of technology, however, are left desiring more. The book does not engage with works written by historians of technology, and it does not pose questions historians of technology would have asked. The lessons it draws from history, too, differ significantly from the lessons historians of technology usually seek. A concise volume, the book covers 400 years of history in only seventy pages, which does not leave much space for discussion of the contexts in which ideas about self-replicators developed. Those who are already well-versed in history, science, and technology will likely be able to fill in many gaps. Students, however, should be encouraged to supplement this book with works that provide historical analysis...

  PublisherDOI

• The short, strange life of the first friendly robot: Japan's Gakutensoku was a giant pneumatic automaton that toured through Asia—until it mysteriously disappeared

  IEEE Spectrum · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Rossum's Universal Robots-or R.U.R., as it had become known- had premiered two years earlier in Prague and had already become a worldwide sensation. The play, written by Karel Ğapek, describes the creation of enslaved synthetic humans, or robots-a term derived from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor." Ğapek's robots, originally made to serve their human masters, gained consciousness and rebelled, soon killing all humans on Earth. In the play's final scene, the robots reveal that they possess emotions just like we do, and the audience is left wondering whether they would also achieve the ability to reproduce-the only thing still separating robots from humans.

  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Aaron S. Moore (1972–2019)

  Technology and Culture · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access

  forerunner in the history of technology in Asia, friend, colleague, and scholar.His life and career cut short has left an empty space in the heart of a network of scholars who have known and benefited from his quiet curiosity

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Philip Brown

  64 shared

• Ying Tan

  64 shared

• Christopher W. Jones

  Fiona Stanley Hospital

  64 shared

• Lisa Onaga

  Nanyang Technological University

  64 shared

• Hiromi Mizuno

  64 shared

• Takashi Nishiyama

  Wesleyan University

  64 shared

• John P. DiMoia

  64 shared

• Nobuhiro Yamane

  Gunma University

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History of Science and Technology

  Princeton University