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Hilde De Weerdt

Senior Researcher

Hilde De Weerdt (orcid 0000-0002-9670-674X) is Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History at KU Leuven and Senior Researcher at IISH. Professor De Weerdt is broadly interested in social, political, and intellectual history, both within an East Asian context, and within a comparative or global historical framework. At IISH she works on the social history of public infrastructures.

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 (2013-2022). She has published five volumes on Chinese political culture, 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).

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”).

Publications: Hilde De Weerdt – Research output — Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)

Key publications: ENG

Books:

Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127-1276). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. 508 pp.

  • Chinese translation: Hu Yongguang, tr. 义旨之争：南宋科举规范之折冲, Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2015.

 Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. 536 pp.

Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, co-edited with Julius Morche. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 634pp.

The Essentials of Governance, co-edited with Glen Dudbridge † and Gabe van Beijeren. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 442pp.

Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print--China, 900-1400, co-edited with Lucille Chia. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 446 pp.

Key Articles and Software

“Citizenship and Subjecthood in the Historiography on Imperial China.” In The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship, ed. Guo Zhonghua (Routledge, 2021), pp. 32-47. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003225843-4

 “Considering Citizenship in Imperial Chinese History,” Citizenship Studies 23:3 (2019): 256-76, https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2019.1603272

 “Mediation and Communication in Medieval Politics,” with John Watts and Catherine Holmes, Past and Present 238, suppl_13 (2018): 261–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gty034

“Creating, Linking, Analyzing Chinese & Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS & COMPARATIVUS,” Journal of Chinese History 4.2 (2020): 519-27, https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.23

Hilde de Weerdt (by MoniqueKooijmans)