Jeffrey Weng

Jeffrey Weng studies language and nationalism in modern China. His book project, Out of Many Voices, One: Language and the Reinvention of the Chinese Nation, addresses the puzzle of Chinese unity amid the disintegration of other multiethnic empires in the twentieth century. It argues that the resort to Chinese or Asian exceptionalism—an Orientalizing tendency to regard Chinese and other East Asian societies as exceptionally homogeneous—is a common move in explaining China’s anomalous unity, one based on shaky premises and a faulty understanding of the country’s cultural and linguistic diversity. At the very least, ethnic or cultural exceptionalism cannot explain Chinese unity.

Weng holds degrees from Yale and the University of California Berkeley. Before joining the NTU faculty, he held an appointment as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University. His work has appeared in publications including the Journal of Asian Studies and Theory and Society.

Education

B.A., Department of Political Science, Yale University
M.A., Department of Sociology, University of California Berkeley
Ph. D. in Sociology, University of California Berkeley

Current Position

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University

Employment

Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow, Contemporary Asia at Stanford University

Recent Research Project

Book《Out of Many Voices, One: Language and the Reinvention of the Chinese Nation》

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• Weng, Jeffrey. Forthcoming. “Stop the Presses! Publishing Chinese Character Simplification, 1935–1936.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.
• Weng, Jeffrey. 2020. “End of an Era: Transforming Language and Society in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ca. 1870–1950.” European Journal of Sociology 61(2): 269–299.
• Weng, Jeffrey. 2020. “Uneasy Companions: Language and Human Collectivities in the Remaking of Chinese Society in the Early Twentieth Century.” Theory & Society. 49(1):75–100.
• Weng, Jeffrey. 2018. “What is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China,” Journal of Asian Studies. 77(3): 611–633.

Book Chapters

• Weng, Jeffrey. 2020. “Vernacular Language Movement.” Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lie, John and Jeffrey Weng. 2020. “East Asia.” Pp. 129–146 in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Book Reviews

• Weng, Jeffrey. Forthcoming. “Sound, Meaning, Shape: The Phonologist Wei Jiangong (1901–1980) between Language Study and Language Planning, by Mariana Münning.” Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.
• Weng, Jeffrey. 2023. “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu.” The Journal of Asian Studies. 82(3):471–472.
• Weng, Jeffrey. 2017. “The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China, by Kate Merkel-Hess.” The China Review 17(3).