| 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
Liu Dong is founding editor of Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), the first blind-peer-reviewed academic journal in China for humanities and social sciences. He is also Professor of Chinese and Philosophy, and Vice Dean of the Guoxue yuan (Academy of Traditional Chinese Learning) at...
Max Palevsky Professor Emerita of Anthropology and of Social Sciences
University of Chicago
Judith Farquhar is the Max Palevsky Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She studies traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China and is the author of several books, including, most recently, Ten Thousand Things:...
Professor of International Literature
Beijing Foreign Studies University
Professor of International Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, Professor Wang Min-An is engaged in research of culture theory, literature and critics writing. He has seven publications including The Limits of Michel Foucault, Body, Space and Postmodernism. He also edits...
University Professor with appointments in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Committee on Social Thought
University of Chicago
Professor Saussy's primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.
His 2022 book,...
Professor, Department of English
University of Calgary
Shaobo Xie did his PhD in twentieth-century literary theory. He has research and teaching interests in the areas of postcolonial theory and literature, Derridean deconstruction, neo-Marxism, cultural studies, globalization, comparative literature, critical theory, Chinese Canadian literature,...
Professor, National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Department of History
Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Ge Zhaoguang is the director of the National Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Fudan University, Shanghai. His work includes many studies of Daoism and Buddhism in the mid-imperial period, and a two-volume synthesis entitled History of Chinese Thought: Knowledge, Thought...
