Overview

Kaijun Chen (Ph.D Columbia) specializes in the Chinese literature and material culture of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912), with a particular interest in the history of technology. He held a Postdoctoral position at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin before coming to Brown in 2016. His first monograph project investigates how the multiethnic Qing state trained experts to control the technology and aesthetics of the eighteenth century porcelain industry, and how such techno-political control shaped expert officials’ cultural production, including their literary writing. His other published studies examine the literary rhetoric in artisanal and merchants’ manuals, which transferred technical knowledge and negotiated taste in decorative arts, in both domestic and global networks.

Brown Affiliations

• East Asian Studies

Research Areas