Professor Hilde De Weerdt is a historian of early modern Chinese and global history, specializing in information and intellectual history. She is also a leading figure in Digital Humanities. 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 De Weerdt discusses 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.”
Sponsored by the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities and the Center for East Asian Studies
This event is part of a workshop series is titled “The Lure of Information: Reexamining Information/Information Studies in the Sinographic World.”