Knowledge Production in East Asia is a lecture and seminar series organized by the Critical China Studies group at YCAR. Initiated in 2014, it invites leading international scholars to share their work on the content, reception, and material production of various registers of knowledge in historical societies in East Asia.

After a hiatus, the series is resuming in 2024 with two in-person lectures. The first is a launch of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future on February 7. Christine Y. L. Luk of Tsinghua University in Beijing will speak on the transnational history of science at the second series event on March 21.

The series has featured lectures by Cynthia Brokaw (Brown University) on woodblock publishing in seventeenth to twentieth century China (2014); Peter Zarrow (University of Connecticut) on civics textbooks in early-twentieth-century China (2014); Yi-li Wu (University of Michigan) on a seventeenth-century gynecology text in China and Korea (2015); Yuming He (University of California, Davis) on humans, animals and global geography in early modern China; and Pierre-Étienne Will (Collège de France) on legal casebooks in Qing dynasty China (2018).

The series is organized by Joan Judge (History), supported by the York Centre for Asian Research and the Jackson Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.