The conference will kick off on November 9, 2023, with welcoming speeches by president of Freie Universität Berlin, Professor Günter M. Ziegler, and director of the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Professor Eun-Jeung Lee. Following this, there will be a roundtable from 1:15 p.m. featuring renowned experts in East Asian studies from across the USA, Europe, and Freie Universität: Professor Heonik Kwon (University of Cambridge, UK), Professor Carol Gluck (Columbia University, USA), Professor Klaus Mühlhahn (Zeppelin University, Germany), Professor Jessica Gienow-Hecht (Freie Universität Berlin), and Professor Susan Pharr (Harvard University, USA). A main focus of the roundtable will be the tensions between shared cultural legacies in East Asia such as Confucianism, calligraphy, and tea culture, especially in the context of how the distinct colonial and imperial history of the region has created a lasting legacy of power dynamics that manifest in contestations over the patenting of certain cultural products, such as kimchi or pop culture; or competing practices of the international cultural centers of China, Japan, and Korea – dynamics that also result in hate speech or raise the question of common cultures of remembrance.

The “Diversity in Unity – Cultural Diplomacy in East Asia” conference will also include the inauguration of the new master’s degree program, “Global East Asia,” which will be offered at Freie Universität Berlin for the first time beginning in the 2023/2024 winter semester. This interdisciplinary degree program will unite students and instructors from across the fields of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese studies and focus on the global interconnectivity of East Asia both past and present.

The Graduate School of East Asian Studies (GEAS)

The GEAS was founded in 2013 as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. It is an interdisciplinary doctoral degree program that places great importance on training in social sciences methodology, linguistic skills, and regional expertise. The GEAS specializes in East Asia as its main region of interest. However, research at GEAS is not limited to the three countries China, Japan, and Korea; the school also encourages its doctoral students to look at ways in which developments in and phenomena from East Asia affect other regions of the world.

M.A. Global East Asia (MAGEA)

The “Global East Asia” master’s degree program is an interdisciplinary degree program offered by the Seminar of East Asian Studies in close cooperation with the Graduate School of East Asian Studies. It focuses on topics surrounding the complexity and dynamics of East Asia and its global entanglements both past and present. The program provides students with both discipline-specific and multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological competencies that enable them to address complex interdisciplinary issues and to productively engage with the field of study of “global East Asia” in its historical and contemporary development. A particular focus of the program is on the structural features that comprise East Asia as a cohesive area, as well as on the political, economic, and cultural barriers that have prevented further integration.