| Four Visiting Fellows joined University scholars to explore the writing of Chinese history from the perspective of “New National Studies.” Discussions centered on how history writing helps shape our understanding of the present. |
History-writing in China often strikes U.S. readers as nationalistic and therefore “out of step” with Euro-American common practice. Our assumption was rather that the historiographic conventions differ, and require a reading that engages, as do Chinese humanists, with philosophical questions drawn from both Chinese and non-Chinese traditions. Among the profound, long-term social particularities of the Chinese intelligentsia are an appreciation of philology and a ready circulation among disciplines usually kept separate in our academy: history, aesthetics, and metaphysics. We located the maximal contrast in styles of understanding history in the currently-influential scholarly movement known as “New National Studies” (Xin Guoxue). By engaging Chinese scholars through an on-going series of short-term visiting scholarships, this project sharpened our understanding of humanities and social scientific research being conducted in China today and helped UChicago scholars reflect on the protocols and implicit frontiers of their own arguments.
Professor, Chinese and Philosophy, and Vice Dean, Academy of Traditional Chinese Learning
Tsinghua University
Max Palevsky Professor Emerita of Anthropology and of Social Sciences
University of Chicago
Professor of International Literature
Beijing Foreign Studies University
University Professor with appointments in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Committee on Social Thought
University of Chicago
Professor, Department of English
University of Calgary
Professor, National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Department of History
Fudan University, Shanghai, China
