Speaker: Hilde De Weerdt,  Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History, KU Leuven

Hilde De Weerdt joined the Early Modern History Research Group, KU Leuven in March 2022 as Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History. Professor De Weerdt is broadly interested in intellectual, social, and political history, both within an East Asian context, and within a comparative or global historical framework.

She studied Chinese and Chinese History at KU Leuven (BA) and Harvard University (PH.D.) and taught history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (2002-2007, Assistant Professor), Oxford University (2007-2012, Associate Professor), and King’s College London (2012-2013, Reader) before becoming Chair Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University in 2013. She has published five volumes on Chinese political culture and intellectual history, focusing on the workings of late imperial Chinese bureaucratic infrastructures and political communication (Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, ed., 2021; The Essentials of Governance, tr. and ed., 2021; Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, 2015; Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127-1276), 2007; Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print–China, 900-1400, ed., 2011).

She is currently working on a longue-durée global history of Chinese political advice literature. In 2021 she received funding from the European Research Council and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to extend her earlier work on Chinese state infrastructures into a large-scale collaborative project on the social and regional histories of material infrastructures (roads, bridges, city walls) (1000-1800).

She maintains an active interest in designing and developing digital research methods for East Asian and other languages. With Brent Ho she co-designed the text annotation and reading platform MARKUS, and with Mees Gelein two text comparison modules COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS. (On the history of and concept behind these and related digital research projects, see “Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS”).