"Impersonal Rule: Logistical Power and the Canal du Midi": A presentation by Chandra Mukerji April 3, 2009

Chandra Mukerji is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Prof. 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 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. 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.

Tate Laboratory of Physics, Room 131. Organized by the Theorizing Early Modern Studies Collaborative.

Official Website: http://tems.umn.edu