Professor Hilde De Weerdt delivered a keynote lecture titled Mobilizing Chinese Information and Media in Early Modern France: How the History of Information Can Inform Global Conceptual and Intellectual Histories of Governance and Infrastructure for the workshop The Lure of Information: Reexamining Information/Information Studies in the Sinographic World at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on March 17 at 4PM.
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.”