Biography

Lyle Fearnley is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Head of Cluster (Education) in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.  Trained as an anthropologist of science and medicine, Lyle received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. His book, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press) was Honorable Mention for the 2021 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, awarded by the Society for East Asian Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association. In 2021, Lyle was a Finalist for the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year (Social Sciences and Humanities) based on the research discussed in Virulent Zones.

Current research projects include:

1) the politics and science of food safety in contemporary China, including GM rice controversies and the qualification of food safety in live animal “wet markets”;

2) an anthropological history of the medical face mask and the contested epistemology of airborne disease;

3) changes in the infrastructure of waste management amidst Singapore’s transition from hygienic modernity to circular economy.

Recent

• “Beyond Asian ‘mask culture’: understanding the ethics of face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore.” Critical Public Health.
• “Agnotology of virology: The origins of Covid-19 and the next zoonotic pandemic.” International Review of Environmental History Vol. 8, No. 1, 2022.
• 中国与世界范围流行病学的建立。《中共党史研究》2022年第一期。On Chinese virologist Zhu Jiming, global flu surveillance and the 1957 flu pandemic (written under my Chinese name 方立安).
• Sci-Tech Asia Research Network, Technoviews 11: Podcast on my book Virulent Zones. Listen on Spotify or Youtube

Selected Publications

Books

• Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press, 2020)
• Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Edited with Anthony Stavrianakis and Gaymon Bennett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Journal Articles

• “Beyond Asian ‘mask culture’: understanding the ethics of face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore.” Critical Public Health.
• “Fake Eggs: from counter-qualification to popular certification in China’s food safety crisis.” BioSocieties 2021
• “Viral Sovereignty or Sequence Etiquette? Asian Science, Open Data, and Knowledge Control in Global Virus Surveillance.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 2020.
• “After the Livestock Revolution: Free-grazing ducks and influenza uncertainties in South China.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 2018.
• “Wild Goose Chase: The Displacement of Influenza Research in the Fields of Poyang Lake, China.” Cultural Anthropology 30(1), February 2015.
• “Epidemic Intelligence: Langmuir and the Birth of Disease Surveillance.”
  Behemoth 3, January 2010: 37-56.
• “Signals Come and Go: Syndromic Surveillance and Styles of Biosecurity.”
  Environment and Planning A 40(7), 2008: 1615-1632.

Selected Media and Talks

• Interviewed on Channel News Asia, For Food’s Sake, S3, Ep. 4: Diet. (On Covid-19)
• Interviewed on Channel News Asia, Money Mind, Ep. 26: Climate Change Special (On Honk! app and informal recycling)
• University of Cambridge, The Center for Global Knowledge Studies, “Covid-19 as a zoonotic disease.” 23 July 2020.
• Columbia University, Weatherhead East Asia Institute, “Tracking and treating coronavirus in China and beyond.” 23 July 2020.