Principal Investigator: Joan Judge, Department of History, 91亚色
Funding: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
According to Joan Judge’s forthcoming book (University of Chicago Press, fall 2025), a consequential politics of common reading unfolded in the midst of China’s twentieth century revolutions. “Among the people” (minjian) publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national book network were part of an alternative social infrastructure that granted common readers a certain epistemic autonomy. Cheap how-to manuals liberated these readers from state structures that increasingly sought to mold them. Accessible handbooks, recipe collections, and compendia of techniques guided them in managing the challenges that arose in this era of institutional failure and epidemic disease, of external aggression and technological change. The Politics of Common Reading focuses on four of these challenges: how to cure an opium addiction, how to avoid an electric shock, how to prevent a cholera infection, and how to graft a plant. It traces the politics of accommodation which governed the vernacular, minjian approach to these challenges as a counterpoint to the politics of tutelage dictated by “Enlightening” cultural and official authorities. Whereas Enlighteners were determined to eradicate temporal, geographic, and social gaps by molding “the people” into model readers and compliant citizens, vernacular compilers sought to reconcile historical and global non-synchronicities, and to engage commoners as knowers. The book devises composites of such knowers so that we can better know them: details of the crises they faced, the solutions they attempted, and the texts they might have consulted. It argues that the acts of conciliation these readers engaged in shaped the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change was actualized in China’s century of revolution.
Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Professor in the Department of History at 91亚色 in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of The Sinosphere and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Joshua Fogel (Berlin: DeGruyter Oldenbourg, 2024), Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011).
Project Activities
GUEST-EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES
(with Cynthia Brokaw). Lingua Franca: The History of the Book in Translation 6 (2020), 170 pp.
ARTICLES IN SCHOLARLY JOURNALS
Nan Nu: Men, Women and Gender in China 25 (March 2023), 189–97.
Special Issue “May Fourth and Translation.” Translating Wor(l)ds 4 (December 2020), 1–22.
“Kyōdai Jinbunken de no kenkyū seikatsu o furikaette” 京大人文研での研究生活を振り返って(Reflections on scholarly life at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University). Jinbun 人文67 (2020), 9–15.
Science in Context 30:4 (Winter 2017), 359-83.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Xunzhao Zhongguo de putong duzhe: Shangwu yinshuguan de Riyong baike quansu yu Minguo shiqi de zhishi wenhua” 寻找中国的普通读者：商务印书馆的《日用百科全书》与民国时期的知识文化 (In search of the Chinese common reader: The Commercial Press’s daily-use encyclopedias and Republican Chinese knowledge culture). In Shangwu yinshuguan yu Zhongguo xiandai wenhua de xingqi: Shangwu yinshuguan chuangye 120 nian guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji? 商务印书馆与中国现代文化的兴起: 商务印书馆创业120 年国际学术讨论会论文集 (The Commercial Press and the rise of modern Chinese culture: Collected essays from a symposium commemorating 120 years since the founding of the Commercial Press), ed. Yu Dianli 于殿利et. al. (Beijing: The Commercial Press, Beijing, China, 2024), 1: 33–40.
“Vernacular Knowledge in Time: Sinology Outside the Archive,” in , ed. Ori Sela, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Joshua Fogel. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2023), 141–58.
“Twentieth-Century Vernacular Encylopedias,” in , ed. Jack W. Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher Nugent, and Bruce Rusk (NY: Columbia University Press, 2021), 334–39.
“Jingtou beihou de nüzi: Gudai yizhi, shixue lunwang, ji sheying de zaimeijiehua” 鏡頭背後的女子：古代遺址、詩學淪亡、及攝影的再媒介化 (The woman behind the camera: ancient ruins, poetic loss, and photographic remediation). In ‘Kanjian’ xingbie: jinxiandai Zhongguo shushi yanjiu xin shiye『看見』性別：近現代中國 術史研究 新視野 (Seeing gender: New perspectives on modern Chinese history), ed. Lai Yu-chih, Dorothy Ko, Aida Wang (Taipei: Shitou chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 2020), 230–47.
In Search of the Chinese Common Reader: Vernacular Knowledge in the Age of New Media,” in , ed. Jonathan Rose and Mary Hammond (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 218–37.
“Myriad Treasures and One Hundred Sciences: Vernacular Chinese and Encyclopedic Japanese Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in , ed. Qian Nanxiu, Richard J. Smith, and Zhang Bowei (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020), 329–69.
EVENTS
Arthur de Carle Sowerby in Republican-era Shanghai: Bridging the Global and the Local via Evolutionism, 1922-1954 | Christine Y. L. Luk, Tsinghua University | 21 March 2024
The Battle for Memory in China: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the, Future | lan Johnson, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, author of Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future | 07 February 2024
Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press Roundtable and Launch | Eugenia Lean (Columbia University), Ann (Rusty) Shteir (91亚色), Bernard Lightman (91亚色), Yi (Evie) Gu (University of Toronto, Scarborough), Doris Sung (91亚色) | 03 March 2016
Human Kinds, Animals and Global Geography in Early Modern China | Yuming He (University of California, Davis) | 03 November 2016
Constructing Citizens: Textbooks, c. 1900–1937 | Peter Zarrow (University of Connecticut) | 13 November 2014
How did Chinese Gynecology become Korean? A Comparative Case Study of “Women’s Diseases” in Heo Jun’s Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine (Dongui bogam, 1613) | Yi-Li Wu (EASTmedicine Research Cluster, University of Westminster) | 12 February 2014
Book Culture in Late Imperial China | Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University) | 14 November 2013