Mobilizing Chinese Information and Media in Early Modern France

media release: 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive.

Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies

This lecture is the second in a series planned for the 2024-25 academic year as part of the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities. Organized by graduate students in the UW-Madison departments of History and Asian Languages & Cultures with support from the Center for East Asian Studies, the workshop series is titled “The Lure of Information: Reexamining Information/Information Studies in the Sinographic World”. It will be held in-person in Ingraham 206 with the option to join on Zoom (https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/94223500326...).

Using examples from her two latest research projects on the global history of medieval Sinitic political advice literature and the social history of Chinese material infrastructures, Professor Hilde De Weerdt will discuss how key concepts of modernity such as citizenship and infrastructure have since early modern times been shaped by European encounters and engagement with Chinese and East Asian practices of information gathering and knowledge organization across different media. The talk will focus on French questionnaires and reports about Chinese governance and infrastructures and propose that these forms of investigation and reporting should be seen as products of both the French and the East Asian “commerce of information.

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