Tristan Revells

Field: Chinese History
Advisors: Madeleine Zelin and Eugenia Lean
Email: ter2121@columbia.edu

Tristan works on the history of the renewable energy industry in China. His dissertation focuses on the dongli jiujing  biofuel program of the late 1930s and 40s, an alternative fuel program which emerged from the research of Chinese and Japanese biochemists and microbiologists in the late Qing and early Republican era. His most recent work is a digital humanities project initiated at the Science History Institute which uses 3D modeling software to rebuild China’s first large-scale ethanol plant from archival blueprints and photographs. Tristan received his BA from the University of Chicago in 2008 and studied at National Taiwan University prior to the start of his PhD.