On Thursday, December 4, 4 p.m., in 1014 Tisch Hall, the Eisenberg Institute presents Thomas S. Mullaney's lecture, "On the Apotheosis of the Typewriter and the Xenogenesis of Chinese." The talk follows the Institute's 2013-15 theme, "Materials of History." Link for a lecture abstract. Free and open to the public.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (UC Press) and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (UC Press). His current book project, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History, 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. A recent publication from this project, "The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism,” was awarded the 2013 Abbott Payson Usher Prize. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Dissertation Reviews (www.dissertationreviews.org), which publishes five hundred reviews annually of recently defended dissertations in more than 20 different fields in the humanities and social sciences.

On Friday, December 5, 12 p.m., in 1014 Tisch Hall, the Eisenberg Institute presents the workshop, "Translating Bodies / Transfiguring Knowledge." Link for workshop details. The panel discussion will feature Professor Mullaney, Joseph Ho (Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Michigan), Emma Nolan-Thomas (Ph.D. Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan), and Kate Wroblewski (Ph.D. Student, History, University of Michigan). Leslie Pincus (Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan) will chair. Lunch provided. Free and open to the public.