NFC Doctoral Fellows Lecture: Lexicographic Practice: Dictionaries, Print Culture, and Plurilingualism in Late 19th-Century China

How did missionaries, foreign diplomats, and native scholars in China make dictionaries in the nineteenth century? This talk explores lexicography as a site of cross-cultural collaboration and ideological negotiation. From Euro-American missionaries and foreign diplomats to Chinese and Manchu literati, diverse groups initiated different plurilingual lexicographic projects, but for very different reasons.

By comparing these lexicographic projects emerged in nineteenth-century China, the talk reveals how conditions of printing technologies, political and religious ideals intertwined in shaping linguistic knowledge. It encourages us to see lexicography not as a neutral scholarly pursuit, but as an experimental field where competing ideas of plurilingualism and universality took form.