Thomas Mullaney Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Thomas Mullaney is an associate professor of history, a faculty fellow in the Program in Science, Technology and Society and a faculty associate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. His book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, details the history of China’s modern, non-alphabetic information infrastructure and its sequel, The Chinese Computer: A History, will publish soon.

Alongside the forthcoming publishing of this book, it has been a year of many changes for Mullaney, personally and professionally, and he feels that this fellowship offers him an opportunity for growth.

“I’m eager to take a moment to reflect, to do a census of my intellectual limitations, and to see which of these limitations I should embrace as fundamentally ‘me,’ and which should be questioned, challenged and perhaps dissolved,” said Mullaney, who plans to start this reflection by exploring the work of other Guggenheim fellows, past and present.

Supported by the fellowship, which will begin for Mullaney in 2021, he will work on a global history of non-Latin typography and type design in the modern era. This project, titled Hot Metal Empire: Type Design, Script and Colonialism in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, will be based on Mullaney’s examinations of non-Latin type design and print history collections from around the world and on his own practice-based training in type design.

Said Mullaney of receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship, “I’m overjoyed and grateful, but also worried: Now the hard work begins.”