Individual Projects
Common Knowers: Readers, Books, and the Making of Vernacular Knowledge in China
Lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania (in person and online), March 23 – 26, 2026.
Given by: Joan Judge
In this series of three lectures, Joan Judge explores the relationship between physical books and historical common knowers in early twentieth century China. This is a challenging relationship to track. Common knowers are elusive; their acts of reading rarely documented. The books they used, the last vestiges of their reading and knowing processes, have been unevenly preserved and often dismissed as cultural detritus. In an age when digital technologies are both expanding the quantity of textual material available to us and skewing that archive toward what is most readily available and intellectually legible, the quest to find common knowers necessitates new methodologies. These methodologies begin with locating once widely consulted how-to books and thinking with them in innovative ways. They further entail developing digital tools that can help process these heterogenous materials and facilitate tracking — over global space and historical time — the repetitions, revisions, and transformations that signal the broader contours of common knowing.
Visit the website of the University of Pennsylvania Library for more information.
Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting Touch
Book chapter in The Routledge History of the Senses.
Chapter by: Yijie Huang
Yijie’s book chapter, entitled ‘Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting Touch’, addresses the question by tracing a series of medical encounters at the Qing court and on the transcontinental voyage between the East and the West. It discloses how various participants in these encounters, from the Manchu emperor and his multiethnic courtiers to Chinese surgeons and merchants in the South and European missionaries and diplomats, tried to perceive the other’s pulse through their own culturally informed sense of touch. On that basis, it interrogates how such sensory endeavours created fluid realities of the body, disease, and medicinal objects which, in turn, concealed the sociocultural distinction between their associated ways of experiencing and knowing. In doing so, the chapter tackles critical aspects of the pre-modern global medical exchange beyond the narrative of (in)commensurability, and sheds light on the pivotal role of sensory experience in provoking resonance between practices and negotiating knowledges at a distance.
The Politics of Common Reading
Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894–1954.
Project by: Joan Judge
In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge traces the unfolding of a consequential politics of accommodation that engaged commoners as knowers rather than as an unenlightened mass. A response to the institutional failures of the era, this politics was enacted through an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national network. As yet unstudied, this infrastructure produced and circulated up to ten times the number of books as official, mainstream channels.
Visit the website of the University of Chicago Press for more information.