An award-winning Stanford University professor known for his published writings in the Journal of Asian Studies, Aeon and Foreign Policy, and for being featured by The Atlantic, will visit Kalamazoo College to deliver the annual Moritz Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 2, 2019, at 103 Dewing Hall.

Thomas S. Mullaney is a professor of Chinese history and the curator of the international exhibition, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age, composed of Chinese and Pan-Asian typewriters and IT collections. Mullaney directs Digital Humanities Asia, a program at Stanford focused on East, South, Southeast and Inner/Central Asia. His speech at K will be titled “The Future of Writing: Lessons from Chinese Computing.”

Mullaney’s latest book, The Chinese Typewriter, scrutinizes China’s development of a modern, non-alphabetic information infrastructure that includes telegraphy, typewriting, word processing and computing. The book project received the 2013 Usher Prize, a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship and a Hellman Faculty Fellowship. He also is the author of The Chinese Typewriter: A History and Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China.

Mullaney has previously given lectures at businesses such as Google, Microsoft and Adobe. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Dissertation Reviews, which publishes more than 500 reviews each year of recently defended dissertations in nearly 30 fields in the humanities and social sciences.

The annual Edward Moritz Lecture pays tribute to the late professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at Kalamazoo College from 1955 to 1988 and served for many years as the history department chair. This year’s lecture will be presented with support from K’s Chinese and East Asian studies programs.