Guest Contributor, Chinese Studies
Fudie Zhao received her DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and her MA in Digital Humanities from University College London.
She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, where she works on the ‘Tackling the Digital Gap between Asia and Europe’ project as part of the EduTrack programme.
Fudie’s research centres on historical information societies in East Asia, with a particular interest in their role in regional and global information and knowledge exchange. Her doctoral research examined how information about the Chinese civil war of the 1670s–80s circulated to Japan and Korea, tracing the information systems, circulation networks, and practices through which information moved across seventeenth-century East Asia. Building on this work, she explores how digital infrastructures and methods, from digital archives to AI-assisted multimodal analysis, are reshaping the ways in which we study historical information societies. She is also interested in historicising contemporary knowledge systems and infrastructures, situating today’s digital and informational phenomena surrounding historical materials and cultural heritage within a longer historical continuum.