International Summer Seminar: “From Qing dynasty to Republican China: continuities and ruptures”

Saint-Pierre d’Oléron (France)

September 8–14, 2024

In September 2024, Heidelberg team member Sara Landa and Heidelberg fellow Liu Chang participated in an International Summer Seminar in France. The Seminar, which was specifically directed towards young scholars at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, addressed the epochal transformations that China underwent during the transition from an imperial dynasty to a modern Republic with a special focus on the international entanglements and concepts of world to which these developments were closely connected. Through a reading-in-conjunction of various sources, participants examined these transformations from an interdisciplinary perspective by discussing the different transformative processes and epochal constructions that were at play. This reading was informed by a discussion of important theoretical concepts as well as the specific research perspectives of the current projects of the participants.

Together with her French colleagues, Sara Landa was responsible for the general concept and structure of the Seminar. In particular, she was in charge of organizing a source-based workshop on translation and multilingualism in the context of modernization, language reform and the First World War as well as one Round Table devoted to gender and literary activism together with literary scholar Coraline Jortay.

 

The Summer Seminar resulted from a cooperation between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the Centre d’études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, the École française d’Extrême-Orient, LabEx Tepsis, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales as well as the University of Heidelberg and the Worldmaking project.