Thomas Mullaney

Thomas Shawn Mullaney (, born 1978) is an American sinologist. He is a Guggenheim fellow. He is professor of history at Stanford University, working on technology, race, and ethnicity in China.

Mullaney received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2006 after completing a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Madeleine Zelin. His dissertation became the basis of his first book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, which received the 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch Award for “Best First Book on Any Historical Subject.” Benedict Anderson wrote a foreword for the book.

In 2006, Mullaney joined the faculty of Stanford as assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012, and to full professor in 2019.

His 2017 book The Chinese Typewriter: A History won the John K. Fairbank Prize, the Lewis Mumford Award, and Honorable Mention by the Joseph Levenson Book Prize.

Education PhD, Columbia University, 2006

Edited volumes and special issues

The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Awards and honors

2021 Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center Chair in Technology & Society 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship 2018 John K. Fairbank Prize (for The Chinese Typewriter: A History) 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship 2018 The Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics (for The Chinese Typewriter: A History) 2016 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar [Project: Digital Humanities Asia (DHAsia); Duration: 2016-2018] 2013 Abbot Payson Usher Prize [For “The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism.”] 2012-14 National Science Foundation 3-Year Grant (Science, Technology and Society Award) 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch Award for “Best First Book on Any Historical Subject” 2010-12 Annenberg Faculty Fellow