China Colloquium Series: Thomas Mullaney

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk with Thomas Mullaney, Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University, as a part of the China Colloquium Series.

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk with Thomas Mullaney as a part of the China Colloquium Series.

Bio Sketch
Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History, and received his Ph.D. in History in 2006 from Columbia University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011, Foreword by Benedict Anderson). This book charts the history of China’s 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie), a joint social scientific-Communist state expedition wherein a group of ethnologists, linguists, and Party cadres traveled to the most ethnically diverse province in the People’s Republic to determine which minority communities would and would not be officially recognized by the state. He is also principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority, a pathbreaking volume that examines China’s majority ethnonational group. His current book project, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History, examines China’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of a character-based information infrastructure encompassing Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, character retrieval systems, shorthand, Braille, word processing, and computing. He is also the founding editor of Dissertation Reviews, an online scholarly community that features friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended dissertations in a variety of disciplines.

Research Interests

• Modern China and Modern East Asia
• Race and Ethnicity
• Nation Formation and Modern Governmentality
• STS/History of Science
• Transnational and Comparative World History
• Intellectual History
• Linguistics