Thomas S. Mullaney is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the direction of Madeleine Zelin.

His most recent project is a two-part volume that examines China’s development of a modern, nonalphabetic information infrastructure encompassing telegraphy, typewriting, word processing, and computing. This project has received three major awards and fellowships, including the 2013 Usher Prize, a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship, and a Hellman Faculty Fellowship. The first of these two books, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History of the Information Age, Part I, is to be published by MIT Press (Forthcoming 2017) and will be featured in the Weatherhead Asian Series. The second volume, The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age, Part II, will be released by MIT Press later.

Mullaney also directs DHAsia, a new Digital Humanities initiative at Stanford University focused on East, South, Southeast, and Inner/Central Asia. The program is supported by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). He is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Dissertation Reviews, which publishes more than 500 reviews annually of recently defended dissertations in nearly 30 different fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Last Updated: December 20, 2016

Media

05.12.16

Chinese Is Not a Backward Language

Thomas S. Mullaney
Even in the age of China’s social media boom, and billion-dollar valuations for Beijing-based IT start-ups, prejudice against the Chinese language is alive and well. One would be forgiven for thinking that by 2016, the 20th century’s widespread...