Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Assistant Professor of History
PhD, Columbia University
MA, Bogazici University
BA, Bogazici University

contact info:

office hours:

  • By appointment (see e-mail address above)

mailing address:

  • MSC 1062-107-114

    Washington University

    One Brookings Drive

    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Professor Kuzuoğlu works and teaches on modern Chinese and global history. He is particularly interested in the history of non-Western information and communication technologies––from printing devices to artificial intelligence––as they relate to social and political imaginations.

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu’s book, Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, c2024), explores the history of Chinese script reforms––the effort to alphabetize and/or simplify the script–– from the 1890s to the 1980s. In contrast to earlier scholarship that explored the subject as an outcome of Chinese language reforms, Codes of Modernity situates the century of script innovation within an emergent information age, precipitated by the rise of telegraphic networks, printing technologies, and bureaucratic exigencies for information management. Tracing the links between Chinese intellectuals, American behavioral scientists, Soviet psycho-technicians, and Central Asian revolutionaries, his work demonstrates how Chinese scripts crystallized at the ideological and technological crossroads of information politics. Kuzuoğlu’s publications have appeared in edited volumes and scholarly journals, such as Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), Twentieth Century China, and International Journal of Middle East Studies, among others. He is currently working on a new book project on the history of 3D technologies, artificial intelligence, and pseudoscience in the Sinosphere with support from Luce/ACLS. Apart from his humanistic inquiries into information technologies, Kuzuoğlu also uses information technologies to inquire into the humanities. In 2023, with support from A&S, he built a prototype for “Asia in St. Louis,” a mobile app for exploring the Asian and Asian American history of St. Louis. Working with WashU as well as non-WashU librarians and community leaders, he seeks to expand the project as a public-facing DH endeavor. In addition, he is especially drawn to the emergent world of virtual and augmented reality as one of the faculty leads for the Immersive Technology Collective, a multi-year research and teaching project that explores the intersections between immersive technologies and the humanities. In his free time, if he has any, he tinkers with Unity, C#, and Blender.

Selected Publications

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia University Press, c2024)

“Wireless Nation: Infrastructural Politics of Tibetan and Mongolian Morse Codes in China” (Forthcoming, Modern Asian Studies)

“Basic Chinese: Cognitive Management, Communication Engineering, and Mass Literacy in China,” Modern Chinese Language and Culture 34/1 (2022), 1-31.

“The Chinese Latin Alphabet: A Revolutionary Script in the Global Information Age,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, no. 1 (2022), 23–42.

“Indexing Systems,” in Literary Information in China: A History, edited by Jack Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher Nugent, and Bruce Rusk (Columbia UP, 2021)

“Capital, Empire, Letter: Romanization in Late Qing China,” Twentieth-Century China, vol. 46, no. 3 (2021), 223–246.

“Telegraphy, Typography, and the Alphabet: The Origins of the Alphabet Revolutions in the Russo-Ottoman Space,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 52, issue 3 (2020), 413–431.

“Codebooks for the Mind: Dictionary Index Reforms in Republican China, 1912-1937,” Information & Culture, vol. 53, no. 3/4 (2018): 337–366.

“Chinese Cryptography: The Chinese Nationalist Party and Intelligence Management, 1927-1949,” Cryptologia, vol. 42, no. 6 (2018): 514–539.


Courses

“A History of Modern China (1800–2000)” (Undergraduate Lecture)

“A History of Information” (Undergraduate Seminar)

“Cyborgs in History: From Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence” (Undergraduate Seminar)

“Technology, Empire, and Science in China” (Undergraduate Seminar)

“Asia in St. Louis” (Undergraduate Methodology and Research Seminar)

“Mao and the World” (Undergraduate Seminar)

"Artificial Intelligence:  The Mind and the Machine" (Undergraduate Seminar)

"Digital Frontiers of History" (Advanced Seminar)

"Science and Technology in East Asia” (Graduate Seminar)

“Literature of History” (Graduate Seminar)

in the news:

Chen, Kuzuoğlu awarded ACLS early career fellowships

Alphabet revolutions

Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures announces first round of funded projects

Back to Ampersand
Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.
Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms―efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system―from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.
Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.