Chinese Typewriters and Recursive Embodiment: Humans Embodying Machines Embodying Humans Embodying Machines

Thomas S. Mullaney will speak on typewriters in China at Columbia University.

Thomas S. Mullaney received his Ph.D. in History in 2006 from Columbia University, and in the same year joined the faculty of Stanford University as Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, forthcoming 2010, 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: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth, a pathbreaking volume that examines China’s majority ethnonational group. He is currently writing the first-ever global history of the Chinese typewriter, one of the most significant and misunderstood technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.