Professor Kuzuoğlu works and teaches on modern Chinese and global history. He is particularly interested in the history of non-Western information and communication technologies––from printing devices to artificial intelligence––as they relate to social and political imaginations.
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu’s book project, Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age, explores the history of script reforms in China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During this period, Chinese intellectuals attacked the Chinese writing system as inadequate to meet the demands of an emergent global knowledge economy, precipitated by the rise of telegraphic networks, printing technologies, and bureaucratic exigencies for information management. Tracing the links between Chinese intellectuals, American behavioral scientists, Soviet psycho-technicians, and Central Asian thinkers in inventing new scripts for China, his work evaluates the history of Chinese scripts as a transnational history of information and communications.