Fellowship Program

Rolf Scheuermann holds a diploma in Buddhist Studies from the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute, New Delhi (2004), and a Magister (2010) as well as a doctorate (2016) in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from the University of Vienna. His doctoral research explored the Four Dharmas of Gampopa, an influential 10th-century Tibetan Buddhist key text. His recent research focuses particularly on eco-Buddhist movements and Buddhist responses to the climate crisis, (Tibetan) Buddhist strategies for coping with the future, translation, and cultural exchange processes. He served as research coordinator of the Käte Hamburger Centres of Erlangen and Heidelberg and as a Locum Professor for Tibetan Studies (Professurvertretung) at the Universities of Leipzig and Munich.

Buddhism in a Changing World: Reimagining the Future in the Context of the Climate Crisis

The effects of the climate crisis are unevenly distributed and already carry severe consequences for India and other traditionally Buddhist countries. With increased heat waves, droughts, floods, and other natural catastrophes, climate change can no longer be neglected, not even in the ‘Global North’. This rapidly changing world and the related environmental emergency challenge the established religious narratives and provoke innovative approaches that respond to the transformation of life worlds. This project examines Buddhist responses from two complementary perspectives: on the one hand, the study explores the dynamic field of contemporary eco-Buddhist movements and activist groups such as XR Buddhists and the shift in their interpretation of Buddhist soteriology from an emphasis on liberation from the world toward stewardship in the form of responsible care for the world. On the other hand, it investigates traditional Buddhist approaches to the environmental crisis, such as resolute aspirations (praṇidhāna), a religious practice grounded in the understanding that adepts can shape or even create utopian environments through the power of their merit combined with continuous aspirations. In this way, the study discusses how Buddhist narratives and techniques shape the future, situating Buddhist environmentalism within broader discussions on the planetary future, interconnectedness, resilience, and hope.

Culturally Sensitive Handling of Religious Rites After a Terrorist or Extremist Attack with Fatalities

(Kultursensibler Umgang mit religiösen Riten nach einem terroristischen oder extremistischen Anschlag mit Todesopfern)

The project “Culturally Sensitive Handling of Religious Rites After a Terrorist or Extremist Attack with Fatalities (Kultursensibler Umgang mit religiösen Riten nach einem terroristischen oder extremistischen Anschlag mit Todesopfern)“ examines how different religious and cultural traditions approach death and commemoration, particularly in the aftermath of violent attacks. In many Western societies, including Germany, historically dominant Christian funeral practices are declining while religious diversity is increasing due to various social and migratory factors. This has created complex situations where victims and their bereaved families may adhere to different faiths, making a culturally sensitive approach to death rituals essential. The emotional impact of loss is particularly severe after terrorist or extremist attacks, as survivors also experience powerlessness, fear, and public scrutiny. In such cases, failing to acknowledge religious rites can exacerbate the distress of grieving families. Due to the complex situations, German authorities and support organizations may face challenges in handling such situations in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner. The project is carried out in cooperation with Johannes Eurich (Institute for the Study of Christian Social Services) and aims to develop practical guidelines for institutions involved in victim assistance, ensuring respectful and knowledgeable engagement with diverse religious traditions (including Chinese and Tibetan perspectives). It compiles the outcomes of a workshop with experts into a German language resource to help professionals navigate religious death rituals and commemoration sensitively in times of crisis.

Fei Sheng is affiliated with the Department of History at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), which is located in Guangzhou, China. He obtained his degree from Peking University. Additionally, he used to be a Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) in both 2013 and 2017. He is actively engaged in research and writing within the realm of global environmental history. Specifically, his focus lies in the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific region and the ecological exchanges that have taken place between China and Oceania. Currently, he is delving into the maritime history of the Pacific. Prof. Fei Sheng has organized a series of lectures on environmental history at SYSU, along with seminars centered around global environmental history. Moreover, he will be an official member of the scientific expedition team to the Arctic in 2024.

Chinese maritime environmental history: from sea to the ocean

Traditionally, the research on Chinese maritime history has been rather restricted to coastal and offshore matters, with maritime history being seen as an appendage or supplementary part of terrestrial history. However, over the past two decades, remarkable changes have emerged in the field of maritime history studies. Notably, the emergence of marine environmental history has significantly propelled the innovation of such research.

 

Firstly, the ocean is increasingly being perceived as an independent research entity, and greater attention is being directed towards the influence of the ocean's natural environmental elements on human society. For instance, the impact of ocean currents, tides, and marine ecosystems on coastal communities and economic activities is now being explored more thoroughly.

 

Secondly, issues related to transnational and global history have received more focus. Particularly, the communication networks between China and major oceans have come under closer scrutiny. The flow of natural substances, such as trade goods, marine species, and oceanic resources, has become crucial in understanding and interpreting these networks.

 

Thirdly, there is a growing concern about how human activities, including fishing, aquaculture, and shipping, impact the environmental issues beneath the sea level. This has led to numerous debates, for example, regarding the sustainability of fishing practices and the effects of aquaculture on marine ecosystems.

 

Nevertheless, several problems still persist in the current research on Chinese maritime history. One issue is the overemphasis on domestic matters within China, resulting in a relatively limited understanding of more external or international aspects. In much of the existing research, the ocean is still largely regarded as an object of national governance, mainly used to discuss the relationship between the central and local authorities. Moreover, interdisciplinary research remains scarce, especially the high-quality studies focusing on marine pollution and climate change are still lacking.

Mu Cao is an associate professor in the History Department at Nankai University, China, specializing in Chinese Environmental History and Urban Environmental History. She earned her degrees from Nankai University and has conducted research at the University of Kansas (2011-2012), the University of Freiburg (2015), and as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich (2016-2017). Her current research focuses on Chinese urban environmental issues since the early modern period. She has published extensively in both Chinese and English and has led and participated in several national and provincial-level research projects. In 2024, she was selected for Nankai University's "Hundred Young Academic Leaders Development Program". She currently serves as a committee member of The Environmental History Committee of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences and as a board member of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). Leaving Harbin: Migration and Environment in 20th-Century Northeast China In recent years, Harbin has gained widespread attention as a trending "internet-famous city" due to its booming winter tourism. During the cold season, tourists flock to experience the city’s snow and ice spectacles, while many Harbin residents have been leaving for megacities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. This reverse migration highlights the dual role of the natural environment: both a valuable tourism resource and a constraint on economic development. Natural conditions have played a decisive role in shaping Harbin's development. In the early 20th century, Harbin was a small fishing village on the Songhua River. However, colonial influences and railway construction transformed it into an urban center. Famines in Shandong and North China triggered migration to Northeast China, concentrating the population in Harbin. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the region's natural resources attracted industrial builders and researchers, leading to rapid urban growth. By the late 20th century, economic reforms and the rapid development of southern China began to limit Harbin’s growth, as the severe winter conditions hindered urban growth and reduced its attractiveness to new residents. Strict family planning policies in the northeast reduced the birth rate, further compounding the effects of population outflow. Many descendants of early migrants to Harbin began returning to the south, contributing to a significant decline in the city's population. This cyclical migration reflects the complex interplay of natural conditions, national policies, and social environments in shaping urban development, offering a unique perspective on the evolution of Chinese cities.

Chan Koonchung is a Sinoscript (Huawen) writer of novels 盛世 (The Fat Years), 裸命 (The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver), 建丰二年 (The Second Year of Jianfeng,) 北京零公里 (Beijing Zero Point), and 香港三部曲 (Hong Kong Trilogy). He is the 2013 Writer of the Year of the Hong Kong Book Fair, and winner of two The Dream of Red Chamber awards. A Fellow of the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University, his nonfiction books include一种华文多种谂头 (One Huawen Many Attributes), 马克思主义与文学批评 (Marxism and Literary Criticism), 乌托邦恶托邦异托邦 (Utopia Dystopia Heterotopia), 中国天朝主义与香港 (China‘s Tianchaoism and Hong Kong), and 活出时代的矛盾 (Living Out the Contradictions of Our Time).

 

What Is In A Name？ Let’s Try To Be More Precise About Huayu (Sinophone), Huawen (Sinoscript), and Some Other Labels (Xia, Hua, Zhong, Han, China, Chinese, Zhongguo, Zhongguoren) Related to the Script-Centric World of the Hua-Han People

 

1 Hua-Han civilization is said to be script-centric as opposed to “logocentric” civilizations.

 

2 To correct a putative “Euro-centric” bias in the academia, Sinophone literature studies could be renamed Sinoscript literature studies.

 

3 Unlike modern Europe, Hua-Han civilization has only one surviving written language: Sinoscript, better known as Huawen, Zhongwen or Hanzi, while its people have many “mother tongues”, including ay least seven major phonologically different “topolects” (each with numerous dialects), and often in addition to a “lingua franca” constructed by ruling elites that changed as regimes changed.

 

4 What contributes more to defining and even holding together the Hua-Han identity over the two millenniums is its script (written words), more than its spoken languages.

 

5 With the help of archeological findings and philological scholarship, one now has a better map of the multiple sites of various non–XiaShangZhou “civilizations” in the Continental East Asia outside “Zhongyuan” the Central Plains, and one can almost delineate the emergence of the Hua-Han ethnic and cultural (albeit hybridized) identity from early Western Zhou time to its consolidation during Qin-Han “empire” time.

 

6 Qin was an expansionist superpower that conquered all of Central Plains and beyond. It probably inspired the Sanskrit word Cina and then the Persian word Chini, or Latin words Sina and Sinae, and eventually the English word China. China is a concocted “foreign” word.

 

7 Xia, Hua, Zhong – these words were articulated since Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn period, much contested in the Warring States period, and defined during Qin and especially Western Han period a century before the Common Era, as interchangeable nomenclatures for the ethnic-cultural self-identity of an integrated (albeit “mixed”) people: Huaren, Hanren, Hanzu, later often indiscriminatingly known as Chinese and Zhongguoren, though its people had never called themselves “Chinese”, and they rarely identified themselves as Zhongguoren, not to mention Zhonghuaminzu, until the twentieth century,

 

8 Confusing? Yes, but it is possible to be more precise. It is also about time to re-examine the expression “duoyuanyiti” (multi-origin integration).

 

Hello, my name is Chia-ju Chang, and I am a professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY. My research focuses on ecocriticism, critical animal studies, and contemplative studies. I hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. As an authorized Zen teacher, I lead Zen meditation courses and workshops at Brooklyn College and other venues. Within my department, I established the Chinese and Contemplative Studies Minor and have been actively developing research and pedagogy in what I term "critical meditation studies" or "Chan ecocriticism." Currently, I serve as the Convener of the Committee on Humanities, Arts, and Ethics for the UN World Meditation Day. My latest book, Thinking Like a Zen Master: The Multiverse of Zen Koans (《像禪師一樣思考：禪宗公案的多重宇宙》, 2024), explores the Zen koans as an indispensable spiritual resource for working through the uncertainties of our time, both existential and beyond.

 

“Knowing Thyself” in the Anthropocentric End-time: A Contemplative Turn in Environmental Humanities and Zen Koan Study

 

While listening to the narration for the Centre for Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Studies on YouTube, I was struck by the statement, "we hear again and again that we are at the end of history but this end drags on and even brings its enjoyment. Man in its very essence is a catastrophe." This insightful critique of apocalypticism, and its enjoyment (as so prominently embodied in the Hollywood industry) demands the need for a careful examination of the concept of apocalypse and the condition of Man/humanity in the face of climate change. We could also view the crisis of the Anthropocene end-time—the unsustainable way of living that has severely altered the composition of planetary atmospheres—as an opportunity to wake up and create a new civilization where humanity embodies wisdom and compassion, rather than instrumental and technical knowledge, and system that harm one another and other species or elements.

 

Having been in the field of ecocriticism and animal studies for quite a while, I have arrived at the same realization: humans are the cause of the trouble. Repeatedly, we have been externalizing or viewing catastrophes as separate from ourselves, the notion of “living with troubles” is a good example of such sense of separation despite its well-intended call for interconectedness. I gradually realized that “Ecocriticism” as a discipline cannot provide any substantial insights or solutions to the current climate crisis as long as we continue to perceive disasters and catastrophes as events outside of ourselves. It appears that these disciplines excel at providing critiques of existing events but are lacking in their ability to foster our development as mature global and planetary citizens or eco-beings. What comes after criticism? Despite environmental humanities becoming a mainstream academic “humanities,” last year marked the hottest year on record!

 

My upcoming project will likely be unpopular among most ecocritics, especially for who are materialists. To paraphrase Dogen’s famous phrase, I propose that in order to understand the catastrophic nature of the environment, we must look inward to first study the destructive human nature and beliefs. Regardless of the type of disasters or catastrophes, whether they are war, pandemics, climate change, technological advancements, religious fanaticism, and so on, they all lead back to the existential question of who we are and the fundamental question of how we understand, perceive, imagine the world. Furthermore, the the narrative of the “we” or the epistemology of self has been mainly dominated by the Western conception. Therefore, I advocate for a contemplative or deconstructive Zen approach and pedagogy to ecocriticism, or environmental humanity, which involves introspectively examining our unquestioned assumptions such as subconcious dualism, anthropocentrism, individualism, and speciesism. To tackle the crises we face today, I evoke Zen koan and koan study as the genre and practice of our time as the medicine for the so-called “impoverished Anthropocene. ”

 

This study investigates the cultural and psychological transformations in Chinese urban culture, youth subcultures, and online communities over the past decade, with a particular focus on the period during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores how these shifts reflect evolving worldviews, varying responses—or indifference—to global crises, and ambivalent attitudes (both enthusiasm and hesitation) toward technological revolutions. Additionally, the research examines expressions of self-imagination, self-naming, narcissism, and self-abandonment in contemporary Chinese society.

 

The study further delves into structural changes in Chinese society, politics, and the economy in the 21st century, addressing broader trends such as political apathy, the social implications of rising individualism, and the increasing prevalence of depression. A central focus is the prominence of gender issues in urban internet culture, analyzing their popularity and symptoms, and their intersection with underlying class issues. Drawing on diverse cultural phenomena—including films, TV shows (with an emphasis on online dramas), literature, online literature, online games, and popular activities such as “immersive scripted games” (剧本杀), “escape room games” (密室逃脱), and board games—this research also examines online social events as critical sites of cultural expression. The aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of Chinese society and culture in the second and third decades of the 21st century.

 

Dai Jinhua, graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University and taught in the Department of Film Literature at the Beijing Film Academy for 11 years. Since 1993, she has been teaching at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture at Peking University. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Peking University and the Director of the Peking University Film and Cultural Studies Center. Her research focuses on film, mass media, and gender studies, and she has offered numerous courses such as "Close Reading of Films," "The Cultural History of Chinese Cinema," "Theory and Practice of Cultural Studies," and "Gender and Writing." She has authored works including *Surfacing from the Depths of History*, *Gendering China*, *Invisible Writing*, *The Boat Across*, *Breaking Out of the Mirror City*, and so on. Her books and papers have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Korean, Japanese, German, and French.

 

 

Dingru Huang is the Rumsey Family Junior Professor in the Humanities and the Arts at the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University. Before joining Tufts, she was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies. Dingru received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Her research interests include wartime cultural production, science fiction, and environmental humanities in Global East Asia, particularly the roles played by nonhuman animals. Her scholarly work has been published or is forthcoming in Ex-position, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Chung-wai Literary Quarterly, and Comparative Literature in China. Aside from academic research, Dingru enjoys writing short stories in Chinese. Her stories about animals have appeared in Shanghai Literature and UNITAS.

 

Zoopoetics in Global China

 

At the Worldmaking Fellowship Program, I will be working on my first book manuscript, “Between Animal and Machine: Ecologizing Modernisms in Wartime China, 1931-1945.” Based upon my dissertation, this book project delves into the ways in which Chinese, Japanese, and American writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals mobilized cultural techniques to confront the expansion of Japanese imperialism in wartime China, and sought to redefine the human condition in relations to animals and machines. In dialogue with the existing scholarship which tends to stress human factors in wartime cultural production, I propose an ecological approach to explore how nonhuman actors, exerting impact in intertwined symbolic, historical, and material terms, significantly shaped the transnational networks of twentieth-century Chinese literature and media. In addition to well-known literary and cinematic texts from across divided geopolitical regions, this book project discusses overlooked materials from China and Japan, such as popular science writings, cartoons, and memoirs. It aims to uncover the neglected nexuses that connect cultural production, technological development, and ecological imaginations.

 

While at Heidelberg University, I would also like to share with colleagues in the program my on-going research for a second book project, “Zoopoetics in Global China,” which expands the temporal and spatial scopes of my previous work. I will trace the genealogies of relations between human and nonhuman species by examining recurring themes in Sinophone literature and media from the turn of the twentieth century to today. Case studies range from early twentieth-century intellectuals, who evoke animals in the frameworks of evolution, enlightenment, and nationhood, to contemporary global Chinese writers, who place animals at the center of their explorations of colonial memories, diasporic experiences, identity politics, and shared concerns with environmental crises.

 

Shipeng Li, a doctoral candidate from the Department of History at Tsinghua University in China, is a visiting doctoral student at Heidelberg University during the summer semester of 2025. His research interests encompass the societal and cultural dynamics of late imperial China through to contemporary China. Currently, his main research focus is on the history of the Mao era. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Building Our New Great Wall: Forests and State Building in Northern China (1937-1987),” seeks to analyze the political and social dimensions of Socialist China through the lenses of technological history, environmental history, cultural history, and global history.

 

Building Our New Great Wall: Forests and State Building in Northern China (1937-1987)

 

Environment and technology have been highly emphasized in historical research in recent years. Although research on environmental history in China has been developing for many years, forest history is still in its infancy. Overseas research on forest history is growing rapidly, and many scholars focusing on forests in late imperial China to modern China. In recent years, scholars such as David A. Bello, Meng Zhang 张萌, Ian Matthew Miller, and Koji Nakashima have published a number of important monographs. In addition, Pitts, Dr Larissa Noelle, and Dr Han Kyuhyun in the United States have completed relevant doctoral theses. In my thesis, I attempt to approach the politics and society of Socialist China from the view of technological history, environmental history, cultural history, and global history. I have collected a large number of newspapers, magazines, and government documents from archives and libraries in Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Shaanxi, Beijing, Tianjin, and Gansu. I have also purchased many folk materials, diaries, photos, and other materials from private collectors. Since 2022, I have conducted field work and investigations in some areas such as the Greater Khingan Mountains, and have interviewed some forestry experts, forest rangers, and farmers. I hope to collect more archival materials in Europe in the future to complete my thesis writing.

 

LONG Qilin (1981-), is a professor, doctoral supervisor, and postdoctoral cooperative supervisor at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Sun Yat-sen University, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chinese at the University of Macau, a visiting scholar at the Department of Chinese at Fudan University, the Asia Center at Harvard University, the Department of Chinese at Peking University, and the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He mainly engages in research on contemporary Chinese ecological literature, the phenomenon of intertextuality between Chinese literature and text, and Chinese culture and literature in the transitional period. He has been selected for the Guangdong Province Excellent Young Teacher Training Funding Program (2015), the Guangdong Special Support Program for Young Cultural Talents (2017), the Guangzhou High level Talents Program (2019), and the Shanghai Oriental Talents Program Youth Project (2024). He has published over 180 academic papers in journals such as "Literary Review," "Series on Modern Chinese Literature Research," "Southern Literary World," "Literary Competition," and "Academic Research," hosted 5 National Social Science Fund projects, independently published 6 academic monographs including "Eco-China: Literary Presentation and Cross-cultural Studies," and "A Preliminary Discussion on the Intertextuality of Text and Text in Chinese Literary Research Works." Also published a collection of essays and novels titled "Refusing to Forget in Silence" (Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore 2020) and a literary review titled "Between Professional Discourse and Popular Discourse" (China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Press 2025).He has been selected for the publication plan of the Chinese Literature Critics Association's "Woodpecker Literature Collection - Literary Critics' Works Collection" (2024), the 7th "Woodpecker Cup" Chinese Literature and Art Criticism Excellent Short Comment Works (2022) by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the second prize of the 9th Philosophy and Social Science Excellent Achievement Award in Guangdong Province (2021), and the second prize of the 14th Social Science Excellent Achievement Award in Hunan Province (2020).

 

Environmental Crisis in Chinese Ecological Literature and the World of Human Life

 

In 1976, China ended the Cultural Revolution and subsequently implemented the policy of reform and opening up, reintegrating into the world. Along with China's modernization process, in addition to the increasingly abundant material achievements and diverse values, there are also increasingly common and serious environmental problems. The modernization process in China is largely industrialization, and the industrial and mining enterprises commonly built throughout the country which could provide sufficient material resources for large-scale production, but also bring far-reaching environmental problems, such as sea, land, air, and even underground pollution. The environmental crisis not only poses a direct challenge to species diversity, but also accelerates the problem of animal and plant mortality and extinction, and has a profound impact on the lives of the Chinese people. People's consumption of food, clothing, housing, and transportation has brought greater pressure to the natural environment, which in turn affects people's daily lives, exhibiting signs of a vicious cycle. Chinese ecological literature works vividly depict the environmental problems brought about by this industrialization process, and also see the efforts made by the Chinese government in addressing environmental issues. After 2012, there has been a creative phenomenon in Chinese ecological literature that praises the response, transformation, and achievements of China's ecological environment. It is not only the efforts of the Chinese government to respond to environmental crises, but also the acceptance and literary presentation of mainstream ideology by Chinese writers.

 

Zimu Zhang is an environmental humanities scholar working on visual culture, eco-cinema and ecofeminist arts. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the 2022 Landhaus fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU and 2023 VisitANTS fellowship in Critical Studies of Biodiversity and the Anthropocene Research at University of Oulu, Finland. Her current research projects focus on hydrosociality of the creative arts and cultural narratives from the Southern China waterscape, delta and archipelagos. Along with her academic research, Zimu also practices filmmaking and curation.

 

Tracing the Chinese Pearl River Waterscape through Eco-arts

 

The Pearl River is the second-largest river system in China after the Yangtze river. Its three major tributaries (West River, North River and East River), and vast river networks connecting with the South China Sea shape and nourish the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to be one of the most populous urban clusters and creative hubs in the world. However, cultural and artistic impressions regarding the Pearl River are much impaired comparing with Yellow River and Yangtze River, which are often intricately associated with Chinese national ethos and indigenous landscape. Departing from the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, blue humanities, and creative arts, this research aims to explore the complex nature of human-river relations through vernacular ecological art practices of the PRD region. Taking a different stance to the existing scholarship, which primarily focuses on the metropolitan characteristics of the region, this research aims to shift the focus to the water-centric environment of the area. By foregrounding the significance of the region’s water-based ecosystem, this study will also explore the reciprocal material and social impacts of the Pearl River to the region’s art scene and artistic community. Guided by theoretical frameworks from blue humanities, delta anthropology and ecofeminism, this research will further analyse the art works from critical theoretical tools such as “hydrosociality” (Krause and Strang 2016), “hydrofeminism” (Neimanis 2012, 2017) and trans-species care (Chang 2012) to reconceptualise the artworks as important material semiotic registers and ecological archives for the Pearl River and Southern China amidst the global environmental challenges.

 

 

Joanne Miyang Cho is a Professor of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey (USA). She previously taught at Hope College (Michigan) and at Ewha Womans University Summer School (South Korea). Her latest publications are co-edited volumes on modern Korea: Transnationalism and Migration in Global Korea and Korean Culture in the Global Age (forthcoming). Her edited/co-edited publications in East Asian-German Studies include German and China, Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Germany and East Asia, East Asian-German Cinema, Musical Entanglements, Gendered Encounters, Germany and Korea,and Germany and Japan. Her co-edited volume, German-speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1933-1950, is forthcoming. Her current book project is entitled German-speaking Jewish Refugees and the Chinese in Shanghai, 1938-1949. She serves as a series co-editor for Palgrave Studies in Asian German Studies. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship, the Max Planck Institute for History, the Leibniz Institute for European History, and the DAAD.

German-speaking Jewish Refugees and the Chinese in Shanghai, 1938-1949

This research project delves into the intricate relationship between German-speaking Jewish refugees and the Chinese community in Shanghai from 1938 to 1949. It scrutinizes the memoirs, interviews, and letters that former Jewish refugees produced alone or collaboratively. While Japanese Jewish policies determined the political fate of these Jewish refugees in Shanghai, their day-to-day interactions involved the Chinese populace. This study sheds light on their ambivalent relationship, which was largely distant, yet punctuated by occasional transnational encounters. The first segment of this project elucidates the factors contributing to this distance, including social, hygienic, cultural, and linguistic differences. Most of the formerly middle-class Jewish refugees displayed minimal interest in Chinese politics, culture, or language. Similarly, their Chinese neighbors exhibited scant interest in them, amidst a city already teeming with different groups of Westerners. Ironically, their close physical proximity to impoverished Chinese neighbors seemed to exacerbate their Sinophobia, exposing them more frequently to what they perceived as “objectionable” practices compared to wealthier Westerners in the city. The subsequent section illustrates a period of wartime coexistence, albeit less harmonious in the postwar era, marked by limited transnational interactions. Many Jewish refugees appreciated the lack of antisemitic sentiments among the Chinese populace, while several Jews from Vienna acknowledged assistance from the Chinese diplomat Ho Feng-Shan. A small minority of the refugees forged personal bonds with their poor Chinese neighbors. They established deeper connections with some members of the Chinese middle class, but the number was quite small due to their geographical distance. Moreover, there were limited commercial and business connections between the two groups. Some refugees attempted to learn Shanghainese, although the majority prioritized English acquisition, while some Chinese peddlers picked up German phrases. However, concerning the Chinese practice of cumsha (bribery), Jewish refugees pilloried it while simultaneously exhibiting an unusual eagerness to adopt it, if they had opportunities, to supplement their meager income.

Yiran Wang obtained a PhD degree in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam in 2019. Her research has been focusing on intimate and family relationships, and the “becoming” of subjectivities, of queer women in contemporary China. Her academic writing has been inspired by transnational gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, feminist new materialism, and affect theory. Wang published peer-reviewed journal articles on how transnationally and intra-regionally travelling discourses about female non-heteronormative gender expressions and family power dynamics have influenced lesbian subculture and activism in contemporary China. She contributed a book chapter to an edited volume titled Affective Intimacies, in which she adopted insights from affect theory to interpret empirical data about female same-sex love and sex in 21st-Century Chinese context. She also developed a methodology case study for the SAGE Research Methods platform, introducing how affective experiences can be studied in ethnographic inquiries into gender and sexuality issues.

Affective Experiences and Creative Practices of Queer Women from Sinophone Societies: Moving Towards Europe and Beyond

My project aims to analyse the affective experiences and creative practices of queer women moving from Sinophone societies to Europe, and beyond, in contemporary and historical contexts. With a transnational perspective and an interciplinary methodology traversing cultural anthropology, literary studies and cultural studies, the project consists of three work packages. The first work package empirically investigates how the queer women moving from Sinophone societies to Europe express and give meanings to their embodied experiences, emotional journeys and affective relations through creative practices. The second looks into the literary works of two Taiwanese female authors who auto/biographically depicted queer women’s transnational mobilities towards Europe and beyond, and maps the affective assemblages and temporal spatial entanglements created by these life writings. The third revisits the emotionally bonded lives and mutually-inspired literary and artistic practices of a group of feminist forerunners active in early- and mid-20th-Century China (some of whom travelled to Japan, Europe and/or North America), and queers the well-established nationalist, feminist and popular discourses that adopt the images and works of these women in contesting but equally heteronormative tones.

Phillip Grimberg is a cultural historian specializing in the material cultures of late Imperial and contemporary China. He studied Chinese Studies and International Law at Universities in Germany (Cologne, Bonn) and China (Beijing, Hangzhou). After receiving his PhD in 2014 he held several research and teaching positions at different institutions (Bonn, Frankfurt, Erlangen, Naples, Heidelberg). In 2021 he completed his Habilitation in Chinese Studies at the University of Erlangen where he serves as an Adjunct Professor. Currently, he is a Permanent Fellow at the Joint Center for Advanced Studies "Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China".

Guwantu - The "Illustrated Inventory of Ancient Playthings" of the Yongzheng Emperor (1723-1735). A Study of Courtly Collecting Practices and Documentation during the Qing Period

The subject of the study is the pictorial scroll B/C-8 from 1729 held in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, one of two extant inventories worldwide illustrating part of the Yongzheng Emperor's art collections. The Guwantu, which were probably commissioned as a series and may have consisted of at least eight, possibly as many as 24 individual scrolls, are illustrated inventories of ancient as well as contemporary works of art, curios and other objects from the emperor's possession. The picture scroll B/C-8 presents itself as a mounted hand scroll (64 cm x 2648 cm) with 255 listed objects, cabinets and cupboards depicted in ink and colour. The aim of the project is to identify the inventory of the scroll, to collect statements about the function of the Guwantu and to present the emperor's associated collecting and ruling practices. The project, located at the interface of China-related art and cultural history, is guided by three hypotheses. Dr Grimberg assumes that, in contrast to earlier catalogue works, the Guwantu primarily served not to inventory but rather to visually document the collected artefacts as a representative expression of the collector's "care" for his objects. He sees the ontological side of the objects and their performative, constructive and constitutive power as the guiding idea here. Dr Grimberg then assumes that the objects depicted in the scrolls are material representations of the concept of "tianxia", i.e. the universal concept of empire and rule of the Chinese imperial state. The material aspect of rule, such as the possession and use of sacred or mystically connoted objects that were reserved for the ruler alone, also had a long tradition in China. Thus it seems only logical that the Yongzheng emperor sought to identify himself as the supreme scholar, preserver and guardian of the culture of his empire through the possession of extraordinary objects (including porcelains with dragon decoration or antique bronze vessels from prominent previous possessions) and to legitimise his rule through these objects, among other things. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the scroll B/C-8 and the objects listed there, the emperor's collecting is presented as an expression of political action. According to the third hypothesis, the Guwantu are not illustrated inventories for object management, but individual, detailed and naturalistic portraits of the objects depicted there, which were intended to interact with the viewer as "action carriers" and thus form "networks".

In the first step of the study, both the role of B/C-8 and the objects depicted are described and analysed in detail, using the tried and tested tools. The text-critical evaluation of relevant passages of the memorandum and edict collections, which are available in modern editions, is aimed, among other things, at defining more precisely the genesis of the Guwantu and the role of Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), the Jesuit priest from Milan, who was even to rise to the position of court painter under the Qianlong emperor, as "object portraitist". Subsequently, documents from the archives of the imperial workshops, which are available in digital form, are evaluated with a view to the artists involved from Castiglione's circle and the provenance of the role is discussed anew. In particular, the period before the purchase by Captain Rivett-Carnac in the first decade of the 20th century is examined and - on the basis of the archival material of the Imperial Court Office - it is clarified whether the Guwantu were originally kept in the Yuanmingyuan Summer Palace and stolen in the course of the burning of the palace by British and French troops in October 1860. It can be assumed that the remaining scrolls were lost in the flames.

Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung (https://www.fritz-thyssen-stiftung.de/fundings/guwantu).

Shimin Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate affiliated with the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Her research spans diverse fields, including women’s studies, media studies, emotion studies, and digital humanities, with a primary focus on Contemporary China. Her doctoral research looks at women's magazines and the interplay between institutional reading and the structure of feeling in reform China. In addition to her academic pursuits, she also serves as an annual research associate for the Contemporary China Animation Art Archive, contributing to film-related events and projects.

Rural Women, Technology and Agricultural Crises within Post-Mao Women’s Movement

This project looks at the interplay between the subjectivity of rural women and the narratives of technology and agricultural crises within China’s stateled gendered environmental initiatives during the reform era. The agricultural crises in post-Mao China encompass a range of issues, including environmental pollution, heavy taxation, and population outmigration. Since 1989, the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) has initiated the “Dual Leaming, Dual Competition” program among rural women and utilized mass media to promote technology in agriculture and drive market-oriented economic reform. The “Rural Women Knowing All” (RWKA) magazine was designed to align with and support this ongoing movement, aiming to disseminate technological knowledge among rural women. This project begins by examining the historical context of the relationship between rural women, technology and agriculture in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Then, by using the RWKA magazine and its associated practices as a case study, I examine how the gender policies in the PRC focused on rural women in addressing the agricultural crises of the 1990s. Finally, I attempt to place it on the global spectrum of ecological feminism, (re)considering the transculturality of the state-led women’s movement in reform China.

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media and Kenneth R. Corday Family Presidential Chair in Writing for Television & Film (2022-2025) at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). Her NEH-supported monograph on Anna May Wong, the pioneer Chinese American screen-stage-television performer, is forthcoming.

She is co-editor of the Global East Asian Screen Cultures book series published by Bloomsbury, and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on topics of Chinese cinema, independent documentary, ethnic border-crossing stardom, ecocinema, film remakes and adaptation.

Mediating Climate Change in P. R. China

This project looks at looks at how China’s climate policies and practices have been depicted and narrated, and how a future environment has been envisioned in Chinese-language live action and animated media works from the socialist era to the present day. The climate discourses produced by these media works cover a wide spectrum, from resource utilization (e.g., maximizing the affordances of different agricultural climate regions), terra-engineering strategies (e.g. the tree-planting campaigns to remedy local environmental degradations), to global environmentalism (e.g. planetary collaboration on sustainable growth), and apocalypse (e.g. speculative presentation of mass species extinction and environmental devastation). This project examines how these diverse climate imaginaries have been presented and constructed with film and media technologies since the socialist era. By juxtaposing archival footage and historical science education films with the present-day media works, I aim to address four sets of questions. First, I delineate what the media works tell us about the shifting understandings of human-environment relationships across space and history, and how such understandings both give rise to specific policies and practices and might also come to be questioned as a result of such practices. Second, I ask how different media technologies, modes of production, and audience interactions facilitate the construction of certain climate discourses while obstructing others. Third, I consider the ways in which photochemical media technologies have been adapted to local weather conditions (such as lighting and humidity), suggesting that mediamaking itself constitutes micro-scale yet consequential environmental practices. Fourth, I study how these Chinese-language audiovisual media works interact with similar films produced in other countries so as to place China’s climate imaginaries in an interconnected and comparative framework that governs not only the well-recognized age of globalization but also the supposedly divided Cold War era. My project conjoins environmental humanities, film and media studies (especially ecocinema studies), and China studies to illuminate the mutual constitution between audiovisual media and climate imaginaries. I suggest that mediamaking and climate practices are intertwined and analogous. They both rely on time unfolding at variant speeds to produce continuity, change, crisis, and responses. Pairing media and climate practices can, therefore, offer us a new framework for grappling with the history and future of our escalating climate change, and the roles humanist scholars could play by innovating ways of mediating climate change and worldmaking.

Jamie Wang is an Environmental Humanities researcher, writer and poet. She is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Jamie’s current research and writing are at the intersections of environmental humanities, cultural studies, urban geography and more-than-human studies in the context of urban imaginary, climate change and environmental injustice. Her book project ‘Reimagining the more-than-human City’ (under contract with the MIT Press) explores the making of the urban environment from a more-than-human perspective – from green spaces and housing development projects, to transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographical focus on Singapore. For more information, please visit https://jamiewang.org/.

Cities of Many worlds—Narratives of futures

We are living in a period characterised by escalating effects of climate change, intense urbanisation and environmental degradation. Amidst these growing uncertainties, there is a growing desire to build eco-futuristic and sustainable urban environments through technological advances. From the mushrooming of eco-cities, smart cities to the circulation of high-tech urban solutions, the kind of sustainable narratives dominated (and fuelled) by technocratic and capital-intensive approaches without sacrificing economic development has been visualised as the way to move forward.

This new project seeks to respond directly to these challenging contexts, exploring the way in which a broader interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities approach may offer new, better insights into the complex human-environment-urban relations. The project seeks to draw material, cultural and technological narratives into conversations as a way to understand, and to expand the perceptions of worlds and world-making practices. Specifically, the project will examine diverse material-semiotic imaginings of the urban worlds that emerges from, and/or responds to epochal catastrophes. How might these narratives intra-act and co-shape the futures of cities? What kind of possibilities of world-making might open up if we foreground a more-than-human perspective to rethink the shared responsibilities and futures in a climate-changed world?

I was educated at Peking University (B.H., 2005. Ph.D., 2011), and a faculty member at Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine of Peking University now. For research, I seek to put categories like medical identities, diseases and illnesses, body and environment to the linguistical and historical context of East Asia with trans-linguistical and historical analysis. In recent five years, I focus on the fluidity and non-lineage connections between the human body and animal body, society and environment, the local and the global in our current age of uncertainty and crisis.

Non-human Animals in a Human Pandemic: Entangled Histories

This project will use COVID-19 to demonstrate the fluid, non-linear, and interactive associations intertwining human and non-human animals, body and landscape, local and global ecology in the process of the pandemic. Recognizing the associations, hopefully, will make us to go through this pandemic in a different way, in which non-human animals and the ecological system can recover along with us.

Hailian Chen is an engineer-sinologist trained at the Universities of Tsinghua and Tübingen. Her research has explored the early modern history of mining practices and the Confucian governance of resources (zinc, coal, and human resources). She is the author of Zinc for Coin and Brass: Bureaucrats, Merchants, Artisans, and Mining Laborers in Qing China, ca. 1680s–1830s (Leiden: Brill, 2019), and several peer-reviewed articles on the conceptual and institutional history of technology/art in China. She has taught various courses on modern China at the University of Trier and worked as a research fellow on a DFG-Project, “Monies, Markets and Finance in China and East Asia” at the University of Tübingen. She is currently working at the University of Leipzig as the principal investigator of a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that examines the history of technical education in China.

Technology for Re-engineering Modern China: A Conceptual and Institutional History of Arts in the Long Nineteenth Century

Technology mattered. Driven by Western imperialism, the late Qing reformers embarked on a new path towards institutionalizing technology-related matters for attaining China’s technological independence. For developing manufacturing and educational enterprises, the learning of arts with hands-on practice and their (re)placement in society posed fundamental challenges to the deep-seated Confucian values and traditions in ordering the world. My worldmaking project examines the hitherto ignored non-static concept of technology in the making of modern China. This project addresses how technology—in its traditional term, art—entered Chinese intellectual discourses and became a legitimate field in the educational system, and how Confucian scholars, missionaries, official-industrialists, and overseas-trained Chinese and foreign engineers at the global intellectual frontier articulated their thoughts toward arts and practiced their ideas for re-ordering Chinese society. It makes a paradigm shift in our narratives towards Chinese intellectual transformation by focusing on practical and specialized actors (versus conventional humanist intellectuals). Also, by unearthing previously overlooked conceptual revolution of yi (art) in late nineteenth century China, my project illuminates a crucial shift from art to technology (as well as science and politics), rather than merely the one-sided narrative from art to fine arts in modern China. It adds a new dimension to our understanding of China’s modernization processes, revolutions, and renaissance before and beyond the New Culture Movement (1915–1925).

Dr Maxime Decaudin is a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Situated at the intersection of landscape studies and environmental history, his research examines the historical agency of nature in Asian contexts. In 2021, he completed a PhD in Art History at Sorbonne Université titled ‘A Barren Rock’: An Environmental History of Hong Kong Landscapes under British Colonization, 1794-1898. Prior to joining NUS, Maxime taught at the University of Hong Kong for ten years.

Inventing the ‚Barren Rock‘: The Environmental Origin of Hong Kong’s Colonial Myths

The history of Hong Kong is often captured by the tale of a miraculous transformation of an island once considered a 'barren rock' into a flourishing port and an international financial hub. Hard work, audacious business perspicacity, technological progress, and infrastructural development supposedly enabled to overcome a naturally inhospitable and unpromising environment. This project proposes to investigate the historical intersections between Hong Kong's drastic environmental transformations and the production of narratives of change, improvement, and progress during the colonial era. It will explore the interplay between world-making and world-narration, how the apparent inhospitality of the island, and in particular the absence of forest, generated tales of economic success and colonial benevolence, and the role of cultural productions in linking the bareness of the landscape with political legitimacy. The taking of Hong Kong in 1841 was an epoch-making moment in terms of international relations and European supremacy over the Chinese empire, but also had environmental consequences. The topography, heat, rice paddy fields, and diseases threatened to end the British military and commercial enterprise, but the rapid influx of inhabitants almost immediately exceeded the ecological carrying capacity of the island. The goal is to identify the numerous intersections between the series of drastic material transformations of the indigenous environment (world-making) such as reclamation, drainage, and afforestation, and the discursive consolidation of colonial legitimacy around narratives of technological and economic progress conveyed through political propaganda and cultural productions.

Yan Gao is a historian of late imperial and modern China. Growing up in Wuhan, China, she has been fascinated by the water issues of her native place and the world. She specializes in social and environmental history of central Yangzi region, water history, and Asian environmental humanities. Her first book Yangzi Waters, published by Brill, examines water management and environmental changes in late imperial central China. She continues to write about the Yangzi River, and expands her research interest to human-animal relations and climate humanities. Her current project explores the interactions of social and climate systems in the central Yangzi valley from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She obtained her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She was a Carson fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Duke University. She is teaching at the University of Memphis.

Yangzi Worlds: Crisis and the Making of an Age of Uncertainty

This project studies the 1870 Yangzi flood and its world-making effects from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Tentatively titled as “Yangzi Worlds,” I look into the climate events in the 1870s and how local communities responded to climatic anomalies and their aftermath. Through researching on extensive writings on the Yangzi River and its valley, including official anthologies, local archives and travel logs, this project reveals an age of exploration on the Yangzi and its valley from the 1870s onwards. It draws on the theoretical discussion of “worldmaking” and examines the linguistic representations of the environments of the Yangzi region in those writings. In so doing, it analyzes the different worlds of the Yangzi that were construed by various agencies, ranging from human groups, to water, sediments, plants and animals. This project provides a multi-faceted history of the Yangzi River and its valley, understood through intertwined makings of social, natural and climate systems.

Ziqiang Han is a full professor at the School of Political Science and Public Administration Shandong University. His research primarily focuses on disaster and emergency management from the social and behavioral science perspective. Dr.Han graduated from the Disaster Science and Management Program at the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, United States. His current research covers the public opinion and narratives of public policy related to emergency management, urban and community resilience building, and the professional development of the emergency management workforce and first responders.

Narratives of Extreme Weather and Floods in EU, China, and the United States

How do the media and social media frame the extreme weather and floods in the EU (Germany), China, and the United States (New York) that occurred in the summer of 2021? This is the main research question I will investigate. I collect news reports and social media posts regarding these extreme weather events and disasters that occurred in 2021 in multiple countries. The accountability attributions and crisis learnings in the public discourse will be mainly investigated.

Dr. Shen Hou is professor of environmental history in History Department, Peking University, Beijing. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2011 and 2013. She is the author of The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism (English, 2013), and Cities without Walls: Nature and Urban Places in American History (Chinese, 2021). She is currently finishing a book on Boston’s environmental history and working on a book project about coastal cities.

From Fishing Village to Modern City: Contrasting Narratives about the Making of Qingdao, China

Qingdao was the first and only German colony in the Far East, established in 1898 when China was undergoing a profound change from a self-sufficient, ethnocentric, agrarian empire into a globally connected modern state. Historians have offered political, economic, cultural, and military analysis of it, but they have not paid enough attention to the human relationship with nature and the environment. Qingdao is a good place to investigate the upheaval that colonization brought to the old ecological order. Germany’s invasion became a huge challenge to the people living on that sandy peninsula, who were driven toward modernization and urbanization. Many gave up their fisherman’s identity, their old connection to the sea. This project aims to explore the German and Chinese narratives of transformation before and after a city rose there—narratives focused on local livelihood and ancient ecological relations versus new relations the Germans introduced.

For more than two thousand years, the peninsula had been regarded as marginal land, uninteresting to a distant state as a source of tribute because of its poor soil condition, low-level agriculture, and shortage of big rivers linking it to inland cities. The descriptions offered by both Chinese and Germans visiting the place echoed one another: “sterile,” “bleak,” “desolate”. Yet the Germans imagined a glowing future for the place based on their technological confidence, overseas trade ambition, and appealing temperate, sunny seacoast. For them, this desolate site could become a modern city by the sea, a powerful aesthetic resource.

A crisis ensued for many locals-- a sense of loss as the natural environment they had relied on was reshaped and reinterpreted by the invaders. The Germans came to this old land to build a modern world and life at the expense of a scattering of fishing villages. That ambition was not completely resisted by the locals, but their adjustment over time could be called traumatic.

Shaw-Yu Pan is an associate professor of Chinese literature at National Taiwan University (NTU). She received both her MA and PhD degrees from the Department of Chinese Literature, NTU, during which time she obtained another MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and a Fulbright Visiting Fellowship for her research at the EALC, Harvard University (2005-2006). She worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (2009-2010).

Her research field centers around translation studies, literature and popular culture from late Qing and early Republican periods. She began with the studying of representative Chinese translators in early twentieth century, such as Lin Shu and Zhou Shoujuan, and expanded to the modern discourses and practices of romantic love in China, for example, the writing and distributing of love letters. She has also examined cases of the complex relationship between Victorian popular literature and Chinese literature.

Her recent research project focuses on the writings and translations of late-Qing science fiction, especially their interactions with Western astronomy, imperialism, and/or other disciplines.

Colonizing the Stars: Malthusian Theory of Population and Imperial Imagination in Late Qing Science Fiction

It is acknowledged that Western science fiction, as a genre that embodies imperial ideology and accordingly strengthen its power, combines scientific discourse and imagination of empire. A similar literary phenomenon occurred in late Qing period, while Chinese writers appropriated Western ideas and literature to create their fantasies. In their works, one can also witness the complex dialogues among science, empire, and imperialism. For example, the late Qing science fiction such as Xu Zhiyan’s 許指嚴 (1875-1923) Dian shijie 電世界 (Electrical world, 1909) and Lu Shi’e’s 陸士諤 (1878-1944) Xin yesou puyan 新野叟曝言 (New humble words of a rustic elder, 1909) not only depicted the future China as a technologically advanced utopia, but also indicated that the dramatic increase of population would lead to intense competitions for survival. Apparently inspired by the British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) among others, Xu and Lu considered the problem of overpopulation as one of the major causes of imperial expansion. In order to solve the crisis, colonization must be introduced. Comparing to the historical context of European imperialism and the fact that late Qing China was intimidated by foreign powers, these works had represented rather intriguing parallel universes. Xu and Lu parodied the birth of an empire and its colonies in the ocean or planets and reversed the tragic fate of China. This project will take Malthus’ demography as the starting point to investigate the representation of the problem of overpopulation and imagination of empire in late Qing science fiction. By contrasting Xu’s and Lu’s works with translated texts during late Qing period, I will explore the relationship between the 19th century scientific/imperial discourse and Chinese literature.

My research interests focus on urban regeneration, urban governance, artistic intervention, heritage conservation, social learning and informal housing in China. To date I have published about 16 papers in English and Chinese. I have also received the Outstanding Thesis Award from Sun Yat-sen University, the Jin Jingchang Award for Excellent Paper in Urban and Rural Planning Postgraduate Thesis Competition in China and nomination for the best conference paper award from AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning). I graduated from the University of Kassel in 2018. My dissertation titled “Maturing Governance of Urban Regeneration: Experimenting and Learning--Case Study of Guangzhou and Shenzhen in South China,” examines the interplay of institutions, actors’ practices and knowledge dynamics in the spatial restructuring and social innovation processes of urban regeneration.

Urban Farming and Gardening during Pandemic in China

During the corona pandemic, many cities in China experienced lock downs and posed severe restrictions on mobility. The pandemic prompted many Chinese to reflect on where their food comes from and made many people aware of the fragility of social life and the close relationship between food security and personal life.

Urban gardening and farming has become increasingly active in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in recent years, especially during pandemic period, but not much research attention has been paid by urban planners or sociologist yet. It could become a window to observe social spaces and interactions during the pandemic, because it is closely related to urban land ownership and access, public space and public life, personal spirituality and emotions, and family relationships. It helps us to examine the boundary conflicts between public and private land use rights in community spaces during the pandemic, the reshaping of neighborhood and family relationships, and the changes in individual and collective perceptions of values, personal emotions, and patterns of behavior in daily life. In addition, the practice that can provide more opportunities for in-depth observation and research to understand the social behavioral, social media and spatial changes brought about by the pandemic. In China, community regeneration and spatial upgrading are mostly top-down interventions, and conflicts and resistance are rather common. Urban gardening and farming is often a bottom-up self-organized and initiated action, reflecting the real social needs and self-governance dynamics. In addition, I am interested in exploring how the pandemic reshapes the spatial connections and interactions of people at their homes and neighborhoods from the perspective of food self-production. Through this project, I seek to understand more about how urban gardening during the pandemic reshaped family relationships, neighborhood and community interpersonal relationships, how urban gardening affected people's perceptions of food security and self-sufficiency, and how it affected people's emotional well-being.

Shengyu Wang is a scholar of pre-modern Chinese literature and comparative literature, with particular interest in the Chinese anecdotal tradition, popular religions, print culture, and translation studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and has taught in both China and North America. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature, T’oung Pao, Folklore, and Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies. He is the recipient of the 2022 Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Award.

Narratives of Steam Navigation and Epochal Change in Early Chinese Periodicals

During the late Qing era, modern means of transportation not only significantly altered Chinese life but also accelerated the disintegration of the traditional Sinocentric view of the world. Steam-powered vessels—especially gigantic seafaring steamers arriving in large numbers after 1870—struck late-Qing Chinese intellectuals as potent indicators of newfound mobility, epochal change, scientific advancement, and Western military-industrial superiority. Together with the postal service, telegraph, and railway, steam-powered vessels shortened spatial-temporal distances and fostered a strong sense of the world as an interconnected totality. In this project, I treat late-Qing periodicals as a rich and vital source for exploring the discursive and epistemological shifts catalyzed by the advent of steam navigation in China. My investigation will cover a wide variety of visual and verbal narratives featuring steamship, with special attention to those that bear upon the issues of global circumnavigation, maritime disasters, and naval warfare. My main purpose is to gain a better understanding of how worldmaking technologies engendered conceptual changes in the realm of culture. Furthermore, I will probe into the crucial role that early Chinese periodicals played in mediating the public imagination of epochal changes.

Meng Xia completed her doctoral studies and teaches in Chinese Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on the topic of history, memory and narrative in overseas Chinese migrant fiction. She has lectured at the Communication University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China. She conducted an empirical research project on theatre reception at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, US as visiting researcher in 2015. She published journal articles, editorials, book reviews and translations, and presented her research at international conferences on China studies, world literature and comparative literature. Her research interests include Chinese contemporary literature and cultural studies, memory culture studies, diaspora, narratological theories, trauma and affect, and reception theories.

The Narrative of Transcultural Pandemic Memory

In this project, I pinpoint transcultural memory as the essential approach to globally shared experiences, in this case, the pandemic. “Transcultural memory” means connecting local memories with the loci of its transposition and translation, including memories triggered from transnational experiences as well as memories of global context and significance. Specific to pandemic memory, the disruption of routes and routines, the suffering of the disadvantaged and the marginal, and the trauma from loss and fear, accumulate into common memories relatable to people regardless of their origin and residency. In the case of pandemic, transcultural memory binds people in the sense of mutual impact and entangled relations; yet it also widens the gaps, disputes and splits. In this context, my research investigates how narratives of pandemic memory, expose how people recount, represent and interpret their memory with crossings and shared grounds. I propose that the recognition of transcultural memory demonstrates possibilities to reimagine worldmaking amid the post-Covid crises. I argue that the construction of memory does not only reminisce and commemorate casualties but reexamines and envisions choices of worldmaking. Beyond narratives alleged as factual, rational, and realistic, accounts and visuals of memory generate diverse narratives that tap into the depth and complexity of human condition.

After a Bachelor's degree in Near Eastern Archaeology and Assyriology and a Master's degree in Edition Studies and Textual Criticism, Joana van de Löcht wrote a dissertation on Ernst Jünger's diaries of the Second World War at the University of Heidelberg, which was published in 2018. She collaborated in various edition projects and has been a research assistant at the Institute of German Studies at WWU Münster since April 2021. Her work focuses on literature of the early modern period and the 20th century, and on the field of edition philology. Currently, she is particularly interested in the historical dimensions of the Environmental Humanities.

Traces of the Little Ice Age in Early Modern German Literature

The aim of the project is to examine the different effects of the Little Ice Age on the literature of the early modern period. The research subject 'Little Ice Age' has been a topic of historical climate research since the second half of the 20th century and among historians since the end of the 1980s. The written tradition is primarily considered to have a source value for determining concrete historical weather events. Literary studies has so far only rudimentarily fulfilled its task of describing these sources in their poetic texture and locating them in contemporary literary discourse. The linking of environmental issues with concepts of time and order in early modern literature is guided by the basic assumption that, although we cannot expect knowledge of climate change in the texts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, changing environmental conditions were perceived as a threat to the established order and as such found their way into literature. Concepts of time such as the cyclical course of the harvest year and the near expectation of the end times are just as affected by this as concepts of rule and orders of knowledge. This leads, on the one hand, to the prosperity of order-giving forms of publication such as the calendar and its associated prognostics or the literature of house fathers, and, on the other hand, to the attempt to reorganise knowledge (for example in René Descartes' writing "Les Météores"). The individual events such as floods, hailstorms, crop failures and extreme winters are initially reflected in the establishing news systems of pamphlets and (towards the end of the period under study) journal literature. Occasional poetry also reacts to the specific event and links this to established narratives of God's judgement and the idea of a natura lapsa, in which man's sinfulness is linked to the state of the world around him.

Yizhou Wang received her MLitt. in Arts of China from the University of Glasgow and in 2015 started her Ph.D. in Chinese Art History at the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation focuses on the visual (self-)representations of courtesans (mingji名妓) in the Ming dynasty through the lens of gender. She worked at the Calligraphy and Painting Department of the Palace Museum Beijing in 2014. She also studied at SOAS University of London, Kyoto University, and Tokyo University. She developed an initial research interest in the artistic representations of plants since 2013 and published an article on the Chinese double lotus. In recent years, she has been working on human-nature interactions in arts and literature during the Ming-Qing transition. Her professional research interests include Chinese paintings (pre-modern), Ming-Qing visual and material culture, gender studies in art history, Sino-Japanese art interactions, (self-)portraiture, women artists, and early East Asian photography.

Voices of Nature and Landscape in Artful Spaces of Transitions: From Ming-Qing to Contemporary China

My research project focuses on the visual and literary representations of plants, e.g., willows, pine trees, and the natural landscape during the seventeenth-century Ming-Qing transition, an age when China experienced severe climate changes and deterioration in the “Little Ice Age” which led to the great famine, social unrest, and the governance vulnerability to the nomadic invasions. To survive in the severe natural and social disturbance, “moving” and “hiding” became two major interwoven themes in the Ming-Qing period. When the actual words or communications were difficult to come out for varied reasons during crises, creating imageries of nature, plants, and the landscape became a pathway for either personal or collective expressions as a means of relief and therapy. The human defense and confrontation in the Ming-Qing crises were transplanted to the pictorial and literary representations of plants and natural landscape. This project investigates the following questions: How might have the transitional epochs of constant changes, natural calamities, and social crises stimulated artistic innovations and creative cultural practices? How did artists or poets in China react to changes, represent human-nature relations in arts, and interact with nature in lived experiences and changing spaces? How could the representations of plants and natural landscape create “voices” for the human state of mind? How did the changing environment and landscape with its own agency alter our understanding and mind imagery of the world? Additionally, this research takes the artistic practices involving human-nature interactions in the 1950s-early 1960s and the post-1980s contemporary period (including the most recent pandemic era) into consideration. It attempts to discuss how the artistic and cultural practices of the past, particularly in the Ming-Qing transition, could have played a role in contemporary China and how the reflected ecological concepts of the past could dialogue with the present epoch experiencing transitions.

I graduated with an MA in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on the first establishment of psychology as a scientific discipline at Peking University during the late 1910s. Starting from 2020, I am doctoral candidate and member of the Freigeist-Fellowship research project "Radical Utopian Communities: Global Histories from the Margins, 1900-1950" led by Dr. Robert Kramm at LMU, Munich. I have wide research interests in the history of scientific and political thought in modern East Asia. My current research project investigates anarchism and its biological fascinations in early twentieth-century China and Japan.

Making Sense of Plants and Animals: Evolutionary Imaginations in Late Qing and Republican China

Where is, and what is nature? What sort of conceptions of nature can be the basis of a new politics adequate to the environmental crisis? Questions as such are not only trendy ones that stir up ongoing debates in contemporary politics. In my research, they have long been central ones when China (and Japan), at the turn of the twentieth century, witnessed a new regime of the “western, rational, and scientific” law of nature, that asserted to stand outside the pantheistic Heaven (tian 天) and Heaven-body totality, and are able to manipulate a material nature following knowable laws. In what forms does the separation of man and nature represent civilizational modernity, and following this, can human’s re-discovery of nature sort out the “unpredictable, the random, and the formidable” elements from nature itself?
My research project analyzes anarchism and its biological fascinations in early twentieth-century China and Japan. Anarchism is used here to deliberately transcend narratives of mere political movements; rather, it emphasizes some of the most provocative explorations of the nature-man possibilities. For example, it centralizes Peter Kropotkin’s observation from the centerless organism to the centerless cosmos; it also explores the Sino-Japanese refractions of the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus’s theory of interdependence of human inhabitants and their living environment. One of the questions I am asking in this research is how political activists and biologists in China developed concrete ideals of evolutionary Nature (tian yan 天演) and its relationship with the human world through modern scientific language—by means of studying plants and animals—at conceptual, cultural, and societal levels. Moreover, I also ask how anarchists envisioned evolutionary mutual aid as a globally synchronic endeavor of cooperation to facilitate institutional transformation and challenge imperial and state-centered science of control.

Renée Krusche is a historian of modern China with a special interest in medical history. She is a PostDoc at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), where in 2020 she finished her PhD on the topic of health practices and civilization diseases in Mao era China. Currently she is researching Chinese veterinary history, historical human-animal relations in Asia, Chinese gendered health practices and the tradition of Yoga in Republican China.

One Health in the Chinese Republican Period – Veterinary sciences as a tool on the path to a brighter future

The entwined worlds of humans and animals develop complex relations not only in our modern life, but also in history. This project embarks on a journey towards understanding the exegesis of biomedical veterinary practices in the Republican era, a time when the Chinese state was modernized, strengthened and improved through the use of science. It highlights the links between human health and animal health at a time of great ideological, social and institutional changes, and understands veterinary science as a tool to bring order to the intermingling realms of reality. The introduction of veterinary science as part of the modernization process and renunciation of old Chinese medical culture poses an example of global knowledge transfer, crisis management and inter-species engagement to make a safer and healthier world.

Johannes D. Kaminski’s research interests are German literature, Chinese classic novels and contemporary global science fiction. He received his PhD in German Studies at the University of Oxford in 2011 with a thesis on Goethe. He was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2012-2015) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academia Sinica (2015-2017) in Taipei, Taiwan. From 2018 to 2020 he held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Vienna. He is currently based at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Recent articles include ‘The Neo-Frontier in Contemporary Preparedness Novels’ (Journal of American Studies 55.1, 2020) and ‘Leaving Gaia Behind: The Ethics of Space Migration in Cixin Liu’s and Neil Stephenson’s Science Fiction’ (World Literature Studies 13.2, 2021).

Leaving Earth Behind: The Ecological Imaginary of Contemporary Chinese Fiction / Vom Aufbruch von der Erde: Ökologische Imaginationen in zeitgenössischer chinesischer Literatur

My project inquires into Chinese-language novels that advance new Grand Narratives in the wake of environmental crises. In these texts, the aim is not to reconnect to a state of nature, but to embrace technocratic visions that hold the promise of a golden future—or to regard human activity as pointless as such. During a time in which the West is discussing the compatibility of environmental goals with the individual freedoms of liberalism, the People’s Republic of China is increasingly advancing its own narrative of Progress. Under the guidance of authoritarian leadership, the country has announced ambitious environmental aims and appears much less alarmed by the prospect of natural degradation.
In contemporary Chinese literature, the rise of the anti-alarmist discourse is evinced by three different text genres: 1) The environmental melancholia seen in documentary texts dating from the 2000s has been replaced by more optimistic scenarios. 2) Science-fiction texts reiterate the can-do-optimism of American postwar optimism, presenting humanity’s escape into space as a desirable future. 3) As magical realism mixes with speculative fiction, depleted landscapes become an emblem of metaphysical emptiness, as Buddhist teachings are invoked to cope with an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Dr. Jiajun Dale Wen has been working on sustainable development issues for more than a decade, with topics including sustainable agriculture, climate change, energy security etc. She is currently a visiting fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, as well as a special guest researcher in the Environment and Development Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She was a co-author for the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) – which some call the IPCC of agriculture. Over the last decade she has followed the international climate negotiations closely and has substantial insights on the Chinese government’s reasoning and policy making as well as to what is happening on the ground in China – both in terms of climate action as well as the effects of the current development trajectory. She holds a PhD from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Corona and Climate: what can the various pandemic narratives and responses teach us about climate action?: A cross cultural study

There has been ample comparison between the twin crisis of corona pandemic and climate change. In March 2020, Barack Obama tweeted, “We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.”
The corona virus has put all national governments to test, and the responses vary widely. One universal lesson is that the corona virus does not respect any kind of political correctness or human dogma. Whether it is Chinese obsession about social stability, or western insistence on personal freedom , the virus does not care. Almost any disregard of the latest science would create some loophole for the virus to further its spread. Yet “respecting the science” is easy to be said, but hard to practice, especially when the truth is inconvenient. Now more than 18 months into the pandemic, lots of basic facts are still disputed, for example, whether masks work, whether lockdowns work, whether the virus is airborne. When people cannot agree with facts, of course they cannot agree what would be a science based policy. The cultural and institutional factors driving such divide are worth exploring. Needless to say, similar issue exists in climate realm.
What are the differences and similarities of the responses of different cultures and nations in the face of the crisis outbreak? What are the underlying cultural and structural factors? What can different nations learn from each other? What are the enabling conditions to encourage all of us to face the inconvenient truth, to really respect the science, thus hopefully put into the necessary actions to handle the crisis? How can we create such enabling conditions, both domestically and internationally? What constructive role international exchange and dialogue can play? These are the questions I would like to further explore with this project.

Phillip is a cultural historian specializing in the material cultures of late Imperial and contemporary China. He studied Chinese studies and International law at Universities in Germany (Cologne, Bonn) and China (Beijing, Hangzhou). After receiving his PhD in 2014 he held a number of research and teaching positions at different institutions (Bonn, Frankfurt, Erlangen, Naples, Trento) and is currently fellow at the Joint Center for Advanced Studies “Worldmaking from a Global Perspective: A Dialogue with China”.

In this World of Ours – Making Sense of Crisis and Disaster in Contemporary Taiwanese Art

In this World of Ours – Making Sense of Crisis and Disaster in Contemporary Taiwanese Art When a massive earthquake hit Taiwan on September 21, 1999, more than 2.500 people died within the first few minutes of the disaster. Over twenty years later, avant-garde artists Beidiaibo 倍帝愛波 (Betty Apple), Qiu Linyao 邱琳窈and Peng Yixuan 彭奕軒collaborated in an exhibition called “Code Blue” (藍色警報) that was held at the Taibei Contemporary Art Centre (台北當代藝術中心) in March 2020. Although originally planned to commemorate the ‘99 earthquake, under the impression of the emerging Covid-19 pandemic all three artists adapted their concepts to accommodate for the unfolding global health crisis, exploring “human strategies of coping with natural disaster and trauma.” Together with other members of Taiwan’s thriving art scene – and due to the strict safety restrictions put in place by Taiwanese authorities to prevent the disease from spreading – they developed concepts for remote and/or virtual enjoyment of their art. Performances, installations, video viewings, and readings were relegated to online, Covid-safe events that mirrored the lockdown situations the world has faced time and again over the course of the last year. While the pandemic altered the realities and perceptions of world and life beyond recognition for many people – albeit, hopefully, temporarily – Taiwan’s exceptionally successful containment strategies kept the virus at bay and the island nation safe from the tolls we see in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, the pandemic and its global impact on the artscapes of the Taiwanese capital informs the way artists engage with the world through mediated public and social discourse.

In this project I wish to conduct one month of fieldwork within Taibei’s art community using both structured interviews and participant observation as the main data collection methods to gain insight into how the current pandemic has altered and/or influenced the sense of world and self among artists. In this I follow Nelson Goodman´s concepts of world and worldmaking as highly ductile constructs that allow for the invention, appropriation, and proliferation of different symbolic systems that constitute different worlds. This ontological concomitance provides a frame within which the artists construct and perceive their pre- and post-crisis “Worlds”. The main question that interests me in this context is how the artists understand the relationship between different kinds of worlds – natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic, and virtual, and their susceptibility to crisis, change, and disaster.

Thomas Wozniak was born in Quedlinburg and grew up as an active Catholic under the communist regime of the GDR. When the Wall came down he did his civil service instead of joining the army and worked with disabled people in Tabgha/Israel. After returning overland by bike tracing the crusaders he studied history. For the analysis of three late medieval taxation lists, which came to light during renovation work in his father’s house, an old half-timbered building, he earned his M.S. After he completed his dissertation “Quedlinburg in the 14th and 16th Century” at the University of Cologne in 2009 he worked at the University Marburg until 2015 and finished his habilitation (second book) about “Natural events in Early Middle Ages” in 2017 in Tübingen. This was followed by professorships (Professurvertretung) in Tuebingen and Munich and a guest lectureship at Weber State University in Ogden/USA.

Interpreting Signs of Nature

All living beings are subject to the global framework conditions. In earlier epochs, when dependencies were even greater, rulers in Europe, as in China, tried to interpret the signs of nature in order to dominate it. Since ancient times, celestial signs have been observed and interpreted as prodigies. Based on some of the 25 categories I developed in my habilitation thesis, I will establish a list of globally observable events as synchronizing markers between Europe and China. In particular, the list of specific observations compiled in the process offers many potential insights for interpreting global events. Some questions are how the rulers in Europe and China remembered previous catastrophes, crises and transformations, how their scholars interpreted such events and what consequences were drawn from them.