On July 27, Professor Hilde De Weerdt gave two talks at the Sun Yat-sen University. In the first talk, entitled Rewriting the Social History of Pre-Twentieth-Century Infrastructures, Professor De Weerdt discusses the goals, methods, and preliminary results of a research project on the social history of infrastructures (city walls, bridges, and roads) in imperial Chinese history. The talk reviews existing scholarship and datasets on the Chinese history of city walls and demonstrates how a new and comparative history of these three different types of infrastructures can be written by using an event-based method of annotation and analysis.
Read about the second talk here.