Zhengfeng Wang

Zhengfeng Wang is a historian of the built environment and currently a research fellow in the IIAS/FMSH programme. She previously held postdoctoral positions at Leiden University and University College Dublin, where she also completed her PhD in Art History. Her research lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, consumption and consumer culture, and the relationship between environment and society.

The project

Title: Building Freshness: Refrigerated Space for Foodways and Techno-Politics in Treaty-Port China

"This project aims to historicise the foodscape shaped by the adoption of mechanical refrigeration in treaty-port China, from the late 19th century to the 1940s, when society first encountered and began to embrace artificial cold. From public venues to private spaces, refrigerated environments—as socio-technical systems—empowered a variety of actors and created a contact zone that connected the interests of all those embedded in transnational networks. Refrigeration functioned as an infrastructural element in the modernisation of foodways, a process marked by mediation and frictions at both local and global levels, particularly in relation to the contested and incomplete cold chain that is now taken for granted."

Hosting institution: FMSH

Selective Bibliography

• "The Central Market in Hong Kong: Urban Amenities in a Speculative Field" in Mobs and Microbes: Global Perspectives on Market Halls, Civic Order and Public Health, ed. Leila Marie Farah and Samantha L. Martin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, March 2023), 99-128.
• "Modernizing Urban Food Provisioning: The 1936 Shanghai Fish Market" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83, no.1 (March, 2024): 83-103.