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Making Modern Identities

3–4 May 2024

University of Hong Kong

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The 13th Spring History Symposium

The Department of History at the University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce that the 13th Spring History Symposium will be returning as a fully in-person event this year. The Symposium will be held at the University of Hong Kong on 3 and 4 May 2024 and will provide a venue for postgraduate students and early career scholars to share their research and form connections with an international community of historians.

 

The theme of this year’s Symposium is Making Modern Identities. The modern era has given rise to myriad systems for categorising and identifying individuals and groups and has provoked new thinking about the self and the place of the individual in society. New gender, class, and social identities have emerged, as have rearticulations of old ones. Identities can be formulated from within as a process of self definition by individuals and communities, but they can also be imposed by one group upon another. Just as the philosophies and technologies of the modern era have provided individuals with the means to articulate their own identities in changing ways, they have also increasingly enabled states and institutions to recognise and keep track of individuals and sort them into ethnic, racial, religious, gender, and political categories, among countless others. 

 

Identities interact in complex ways — overlapping, conflicting, and combining and constantly in flux. The 13th Spring History Symposium will explore the many multiple and overlapping identities, both personal and communal, of the modern era.

Keynote

Biology and the Categories of Modern Identity

Philippa Levine

Philippa Levine is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.  She has written on the history of feminism, of socially transmissible diseases, prostitution, reproduction and eugenics as well as the British Empire. She is currently completing a book on nakedness.

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Hong Kong Skyline

Registration Now Open

Registration is required to attend the 13th Spring History Symposium.

It is free of charge and open to all.

Please click the link below to fill out the registration form.

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