In July, as part of the lecture series Conceptions of World Order and Their Social Carrier Groups, the University of Göttingen is hosting three talks:

Empire of Paper. Missionaries, Diplomats, and Early Sinologists as Social Carriers of Translingual Practices and Worldviews

July 7, 2022, 6:00 PM CET hybrid

In this lecture, Eugenio Menegon (Boston University) will show how linguistic knowledge of Chinese was treasured and sought for by European diplomats, linguists, and missionaries alike, and how manuscript culture continued to have an important role in the cross-cultural circulation of knowledge about China well into the nineteenth century. Read here for more information.

The World of Everyday Political Thought: A Transcultural History of a “Chinese” Rhetorical Curriculum, ca. 1200–1600

July 11, 2022, 1:00-2:30 PM hybrid

Shoufu Yin (British University of Columbia) will demonstrate in this talk how new method and toolkits, combined with large corpora of overlooked materials, will allow us to write new kinds of intellectual histories that decenters Western Europe and China while foregrounding the theoretical contributions of “everyday” thinkers of different locals and traditions. Read here for more information.

Arab-Chinese Entanglement in the Age of Global Empires

July 18, 2022, 1:00-2:30 PM hybrid

This talk by Wen Shuang (New York University Shanghai) narrates four little-known stories of Arab-Chinese entanglement in the age of trans-imperial collaboration and competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read here for more information.