It is commonplace to use the dichotomies of the national and the international or the local and the global to demarcate different political, cultural, and intellectual agendas in the studies of literature, culture, and history. Upon closer investigation, however, we often notice that the local and the global are not necessarily oppositions but are intimately entangled. For example, historians point out that imperialist ambitions and colonial projects of the second German Empire were closely related to its nationalist programs. Postcolonial criticism argues that European universalist claims serve the establishment of Eurocentric feeling of superiority. Instead of contrasting the local with the global, this conference explores different approaches to understanding the global world in order to understand political, intellectual, and cultural agendas from different perspectives. In particular, this conference focuses on global visions in Chinese and European modernisms. Internationalism and cosmopolitanism prove two different approaches to negotiating science, politics, and cultural heritage in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Please find the detailed program here.
The abstracts of the papers can be found here.

Contact:
Chunjie Zhang (Fellow of the Volkwagen Stiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
E-Mail: chjzhang@ucdavis.edu

In cooperation with: