Jian is a doctoral candidate in History, trained to be a historian of science and the environment, primarily in the Middle Period (800–1300) of Chinese history. His dissertation, “Relocating Sovereignty: Infrastructure and Environment in the Geographical Tradition of Middle-Period China,” reconstructs the imperial gaze in geographic texts by tracing its shifting focus: from trunk routes in imperial gazetteers of the Tang Empire (618–907) to hydraulic structures in local gazetteers of the Song Empire (960–1279). He argues that geographic writing during the Middle Period allowed imperial sovereignty to survive in shapes that increasingly admitted the mutual constitution of the center and the local.
The project makes three important interdisciplinary contributions. First, it reveals that the construction of a “geo-coded world” was one spatial prerequisite for the biopolitical projects of census-taking and mapping in Middle-Period China. Second, the project deepens the genealogical study of political sovereignty in Chinese history. Third, his work not only explicates the infrastructure-based strategies of sovereignty embedded in these texts, but also exposes the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of these grand designs.
