I’m trained as a historian of China, and in some of my work I specialize in the early modern histories of science and health, and of translation, working primarily (but not exclusively) with Manchu- and Chinese-language documents. I am also deeply interested in historical and writerly craft and method, and a lot of my recent and current work is devoted to exploring in that space. My scholarly and artistic practice involves working in creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry as my primary media. I co-direct the Pitt Humanities Center, and I will be launching the Laboratory for Historical Pataphysics during the 2020-2021 academic year. To learn more about my research and for periodic updates, see my personal website at www.carlanappi.com.
I encourage students to be in touch with me via email if they’re (if you’re) interested in working together. The ecological role that I tend to occupy as a supervisor and committee-member for graduate students usually takes one of three forms: (1) as a primary supervisor if we share common enough research interests in early modern Chinese or Manchu things, especially natural history or health or translation-related things; (2) as a committee member bringing a deep interest in historical method/theory or something-STS-related to the party; or (3) as a committee member engaged in experimental academic humanities work within and beyond the traditional dissertation format.
Education & Training
- Ph.D. Princeton, 2006
Representative Publications
Illegible Cities: Translating Early Modern China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato (co-authored with Carrie Jenkins) (McGill Queens University Press, May 2020).
Metagestures (co-authored with Dominic Pettman) (Punctum Press, May 2019).
“A Historian’s Tarot.” Portable Gray 2, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 159-172.
“The Sound of Shaking Paper: A Sonic Archive.” In Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, Vol. 1, Flugschriften 2019.
“Sappho Questions Medusa.” Geist 111, 2019.
“Reading Needham Now” (with McKenzie Wark), Isis 110.1 (March 2019), 100-108.
“Hide and Seek.” History and Theory 56 (January 2019): S6-S8.
“Following Ghosts: Skinning Science in Early Modern Eurasia.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018).
“Metamorphoses: Fictioning and the Historian’s Craft,” PMLA 133.1 (2018): 160-165.
“Paying Attention: Early Modern Science Beyond Genealogy,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 459-470.
“The Gesture of Photographing” (with Dominic Pettman), thresholds 1 (2017). http://openthresholds.org/1/gestureofphotographing
“A Page at the Orchestra.” In Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman, eds., What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History (De Gruyter, 2016), 221-227.
“Surface Tension: Objectifying Ginseng in Chinese Early Modernity.” In Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2013): 31-52.
“Disengaging from ‘Asia’.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 6.2 (2012): 1-4.
The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2009).