Thomas S. Mullaney

Thomas Shawn Mullaney (born 1978) is an American sinologist. He is a Guggenheim fellow. He is professor of History at Stanford University, working on technology, race, and ethnicity in China. His 2017 book The Chinese Typewriter: A History won the John K. Fairbank Prize, the Lewis Mumford Award, and Honorable Mention by the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. His first book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, received the 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch Award for “Best First Book on Any Historical Subject.” Benedict Anderson wrote a foreword for the book. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2006. In the same year, Mullaney joined the faculty of Stanford as assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012, and to full professor in 2019.

Education

• PhD, Columbia University, 2006
• MA, The Johns Hopkins University, 2000
• BA, The Johns Hopkins University, 1999

Selected publications and exhibitions

Monographs

• Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World). University of Chicago Press, 2022. [With Christopher Rea]
• The Chinese Typewriter: A History. MIT Press. 2017.
• Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. University of California Press, 2010.

Museum exhibitions

• Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age (Museum of Chinese in America, San Diego Chinese Historical Museum)

Edited volumes and special issues

• Your Computer is On Fire. MIT Press, 2021. [With Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip]
• The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China. Stanford University Press, 2019.
• Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority. University of California Press, 2012. [With James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche]

Awards and honors

• 2021 Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center Chair in Technology & Society
• 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2018 John K. Fairbank Prize (for The Chinese Typewriter: A History)
• 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship
• 2018 The Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics (for The Chinese Typewriter: A History)
• 2016 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar [Project: Digital Humanities Asia (DHAsia); Duration: 2016-2018]
• 2013 Abbot Payson Usher Prize [For “The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism.”]
• 2012-14 National Science Foundation 3-Year Grant (Science, Technology and Society Award)
• 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch Award for “Best First Book on Any Historical Subject”
• 2010-12 Annenberg Faculty Fellow