“Common readers have left very scant traces of what they knew and how they applied it but this is not a reason to leave them out of history.”

Professor and Visiting Senior Research Fellow Joan Judge presents her work on common readers in China in the first half of the 20th century, who have received little attention in previous research. She examines the knowledge infrastructure available to these readers, as well as some of the pressing issues they faced in their daily lives.

Publication

• Judge, J. (2025). The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894–1954. Chicago. (2025) https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0012-5127-5