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Profile
Chandra Mukerji writes mainly on the history of technology in 17th-century France, looking at connections between engineering and the growth of the territorial state. She studies both practical and cultural uses of engineering for the development of infrastructure and the cultural celebration of French power. In this effort, she has found and followed a group of indigenous women engineers who were employed at the Canal du Midi. She is trying to uncover the sources and forms of their engineering expertise by following how it was used on the canal and was cultivated in the mountains where they lived. Finally, she uses theories of distributed cognition and participatory design to explain how engineering in 17th-C France was able to transcend the limits of formal knowledge. Unbeknownst to those in the period, many peasants, artisans, and soldiers as well as learned gentlemen carried engineering knowledge of Roman provenance, and this gave them a common cultural thread that facilitated collective work and was surprisingly effective.
Chandra Mukerji also writes on the history of cartography, mainly but not exclusively in early modern France. She is interested in the visual language of maps, and the relationship between images and learning in the early modern period.
Her books include:
Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge, 1997
A Fragile Power: Science and the State. Princeton, 1990
Recent papers and book chapters:
"Entrepreneurialism, Land Management and Cartography in the Age of Louis XIV" in Merchants and Marvels. Smith and Findlen (eds.) Routledge, 2002.
"Intelligent Uses of Engineering and the Legitimacy of State Power" Technology and Culture, 2003 44:655-676
"Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination: Religious Doctrine, Territorial Politics, and French Plant Collection" in Colonial Botany. Schiebinger and Swann (eds.) University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
"Printing, Cartography and Conceptions of Place in Renaissance Europe" in Media, Culture and Society, 2006 28:651-669.
"Tacit Knowledge and Classical Technique in Seventeenth-Century France: Hydraulic Cement as Living Practice among Masons and Military Engineers." Technology and Culture, 2006 47:213-233.
"The Great Forestry Survey of 1669-1671: The Use of Archives for Political Reform." Social Studies of Science. Forthcoming
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