Knowledge Production in East Asia is a lecture and seminar series organized by the Critical China Studies group at YCAR. Initiated in 2014, it invites leading international scholars to share their work on the content, reception, and material production of various registers of knowledge in historical societies in East Asia.
The series has featured lectures by Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University) on woodblock publishing in seventeenth to twentieth century China (2014); Peter Zarrow (University of Connecticut) on civics textbooks in early-twentieth-century China (2014); Yi-li Wu (University of Michigan) on a seventeenth-century gynecology text in China and Korea (2015); Yuming He (University of California, Davis) on humans, animals and global geography in early modern China; and Pierre-Étienne Will (Collège de France) on legal casebooks in Qing dynasty China (2018).
After a hiatus, the series is resuming in 2024 with two lectures/seminars.
The second is a 21 March 2023 lecture by Christine Luk of Tsing-hua University in Beijing on the transnational history of science.
The series is organized by Joan Judge (History) and supported by the York Centre for Asian Research and the Jackson Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.