Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Kaijun Chen (Ph.D., Columbia U, 2015) is a literary and cultural historian of Early Modern China in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. He specializes in the history of imperial institutions, technology, and material culture between the late fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book he is currently writing, The Culture of the Expert in Qing China’s Long Eighteenth Century: the Imperial Porcelain Industry 1680s-1750s, examines the institutionalization and aesthetic control of expert officials, who took a hands-on approach to ceramic manufacture. His other published studies concern the technical knowledge of making, circulation, and replication of luxuries from imperial China to the world.