Lecture | Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History
Technology and the State: Enlightenment Language Machines, Then and Now
- Date
- Friday 13 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History academic year 2025 - 2026
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
In my new book, Devices of Enlightenment: A Literary History of Technology, I study the device is both a “design” and a “scheme formed; project; speculation” with an important technological and literary history in the long 18th century (c. 1660-1800), one that also imagines its own future. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century devices—physical and conceptual objects in literature and science—present a pressing opportunity to understand the co-mingling of Enlightenment technological and imaginative practice. To that end, I argue that a “device of Enlightenment” may be a physical object: a microscope, encyclopedia, anatomy, mathematical problem, thermometer, or a language machine. Although the term “literary device” does not emerge until the 19th century, a “device of Enlightenment” may just as easily also be a literary form: a detail, dictionary, library, periodical, Georgic poem, or an author.
In this talk, “Technology and the State: Enlightenment Language Machines, Then and Now,” I discuss seventeenth- and eighteenth-century language machines imagined by the natural philosopher John Wilkins and the satirist Jonathan Swift. These examples reveal how the automation of knowledge production anticipates contemporary data-driven machine learning, and also teaches us important lessons about the state politics inherent to such practices.
About the speaker
Tita Chico is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and, in 2025-2026, Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. She is author of On Wonder (Cambridge 2025), The Experimental Imagination (Stanford 2018), and Designing Women (Bucknell 2005/2023), and co-editor of Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century (Palgrave 2012).
Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History
The seminars are informal and intended to foster discussion. There are drinks afterwards. Everyone is welcome to join.
If you would like to join a session, and/or receive invitations for the upcoming sessions, you can send an e-mail to: ngassistent@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Further information can be obtained from the organizers Shiru Lim, Judith Pollmann, Jeroen Duindam and Philippe Buc.