16th Spring History Symposium

The Department of History at the University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce that the 16th Spring History Symposium will take place in-person at our university on 14-15 May 2027. Please note that travel expenses will not be reimbursed. Limited accommodation will be provided for selected participants.   

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   The theme of this year’s Symposium is “Negotiating Authority: Institutions, Expertise, and Agency in History.” Who has the right to determine how societies should be governed, to define what should be counted as knowledge, or to decide how one should live? Throughout history, authority has been established, exercised, and challenged amid shifting balances among different sources of legitimacy and the interplay of institutional power, expert judgment, and individual agency. As claims to authority have been subject to competing institutions, forms of knowledge, and social actors, the boundaries of authority have been subject to negotiation. Authority may be negotiated not only through conflict, resistance, and dissent, but also through cooperation, accommodation, and compromise. By tracing how authority has been negotiated in governance, knowledge production, and everyday life, historians can reveal the tensions and possibilities arising from encounters between different claims to authority, thereby reconstructing how the past was shaped, understood, and lived. 

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   The 16th Spring History Symposium invites graduate students and early career researchers worldwide to submit papers on this theme. We particularly welcome historically grounded research that engages with compelling historical tensions and draws on rigorous archival research, focusing primarily on the eighteenth century onwards. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The Reach of Authority: Legitimacy, Jurisdiction, and Enforcement

        Who governs, by what right, and within what boundaries? How have political and legal institutions constituted and enforced authority across different territories and populations? How have governing practices and institutional models travelled and adapted? We welcome papers in political history, legal history, and the history of international relations, particularly those that adopt a global perspective.​

• Living with Authority: Hierarchies, Agency, and Everyday Life

        How do people live with, around, and beyond authority? How have marginalized groups navigated, negotiated, and challenged authority through everyday practices, informal networks, cooperation, accommodation, and open resistance? How can historians reconstruct the experiences and agency of those whose lives were documented primarily through the records of institutions seeking to govern them?​​

• The Authority of Knowledge: Ideas, Beliefs, and Memory

        Who has the authority to define what is true, and who determines which accounts of the past deserve to be remembered, transmitted, and recognized? How have different communities negotiated the boundaries between knowledge and myth, religion and superstition, law and customary practices? We welcome papers in intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and memory studies, among other related fields.​​

• Producing Authority: Science, Governance, and Uncertainty

        How does expertise become an instrument of authority? To what extent have political, commercial, and social interests shaped the production and recognition of scientific knowledge, and how has scientific knowledge, in turn, reshaped these interests? How have the transoceanic circulation of materials and commodities transformed everyday practices? We welcome papers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields.​

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