Professor Joan Judge (York University)
Joan Judge is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto. A cultural historian of print and knowledge in modern China, her most recent publication is The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894-1954 which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2025. She is also the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996). She is co-editor of The Sinosphere and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Joshua Fogel (DeGruyter Oldenbourg, 2024), “Publishing for Daily Life in Early Modern East Asia,” (special issue of Lingua Franca: The History of the Book in Translation 6 [2020]), Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011).

Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Many of the knowledges we can classify as vernacular were enacted by women in spheres that were largely governed by women: whether household maintenance, family emergencies, or basic healthcare. Accessing this level of knowledge and penetrating women’s experience, however, poses significant methodological challenges. Where can we look to find vernacular knowers who left few physical traces of what they thought or what they did? How can we begin to reconstitute what they knew, how they knew it, and how they applied it?

I will explore ways of overcoming these methodological difficulties in this presentation. I will first define vernacular knowledge and introduce the genres of cheap print with which I am working. I will then introduce the notion of vernacular literacy which serves to expand our understanding of which women read, how they read, and where they read. Finally, I will use an assemblage of methods to create composites of individuals and attempt to reconstruct how particular historical women might have engaged in household science—to label clothing, preserve eggs, and treat a cholera infection. Ultimately the presentation interrogates the largely unacknowledged intersections between vernacular knowledge and science, and broadens our understanding of as yet little explored gendered modes of knowing.