Kaijun Chen

Kaijun Chen specialized in the history of technology and literature of early modern China. He received his PhD from Columbia University and was a visiting fellow at Needham Research Institute, Cambridge and Academia Sinica, Taipei. He studies the social and cultural history of handicraft, with a particular focus on the epistemology underlying the textualization, planning, and assessment in ceramic technology. Intersecting close reading and material culture studies, he investigates the textual and illustrative strategies in technological treatises and handbooks of merchants as well as literary representations of craft.