15th Spring History Symposium

    In today’s world, globalization is facing enormous challenges: trade wars, genocides, anti-immigration sentiments, the destabilization of global institutions herald in the decline of mutual understanding and co-operations. The gaps between economic and cultural capitals, gender, race, class, borders and religions are deepening. In times like this, it is important to cultivate a stable point of reliance and resilience. Searching for a way through, historians inevitably look towards the past: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” such is the tried-and-true cliché. Languages and dialects signal our sense of belonging to a group or communities; literary tropes reveal our deepest dreams, hopes, fears, angers and longings; while history unfolds non-linear trajectories that help us revise, rehearse and re-shape personal and collective stories with each and every advance of the contemporary momentum.

    The 15th Spring History Symposium invites postgraduate students and early career researchers from around the world to grapple with questions that have been challenging historians from modernity to the present. We welcome works that produce, employ and engage with robust modes of historical research focusing on events and movements (dis)connecting Asia with the world from the 18th century onwards. Possible topics include, but are non-exhaustive:

• Intangible ideas, tangible institutions

• History of knowledge and technological transfer

• Borders and migration; revolutions and reforms

• Race, ethnicity, gender and marginalized communities

• Childhood, life cycle, medicine and the natural world

• Trauma and memories; public and oral history

• Alternative archives, interdisciplinary historiography