Team

Barbara Mittler studied Sinology, Musicology and Japanese in Oxford, Taipei and Heidelberg. She came to Heidelberg as Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Institute of Sinology in Heidelberg since 2004. She is co-founder of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” (2007-2019) and the Centre for Asian Studies and Transcultural Studies (CATS) which emerged from it. She has been a member of the Leopoldina – National Academy of Sciences and Humanities – since 2008 and of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2013. Her research focuses on Chinese cultural history. She recently published a volume on epochal questions: Why China did not have a Renaissance and why that matters (Berlin 2018), co-authored with historian Thomas Maissen.

Lifeworlds, Systemic Crises and Action Potential

At Heidelberg University, our Joint Center for Advanced Studies cooperates closely with the interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network “Umwelten – Umbrüche – Umdenken.” Against the backdrop of an increasing number of global environmental crises, the TRN is interested in forming transdisciplinary understandings of epochal catastrophes, considering the action potential that they offer. Our task will be to search for answers to the question of how, by triggering radical changes in our life worlds, catastrophes have served or serve as creative crises. They challenge human thinking, thus giving room for action. In this project, we are interested in understanding how, in the past and the present, long-term, effective, epochal changes in living environments have taken place and what that means for future action.

I graduated with an MA in Chinese Studies and History from the University of Heidelberg in 2011 before pursuing my PhD with a thesis on “spirit-writing” (Chin. fuji 扶乩/ fuluan 扶鸞) in Republican China at the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” In the following years, I held positions as scientific coordinator and postdoctoral research fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg respectively. In my research, I have mostly been working on the intersections between religion, social activism and intellectual history in late imperial and Republican China.

The Changing Life Worlds of Humans and Animals in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai

In my project, I study the changing life worlds of humans and animals in early twentieth century Shanghai (1900–1949). Being the centre of the Chinese publishing market and harbouring a multi-ethnic community of residents, Shanghai provided a “contact zone” for different actors to negotiate the understanding and place of animals in the city. In the 1930s, it thus became the home of a Buddhist animal protection movement, which saw the human mistreatment of animals as one major reason for China’s social and political crises. Due to the foreign concessions and the Japanese occupation in 1937, Shanghai also experienced different political regimes, which – in their own distinct ways – sought to regulate, centralize and exhibit animals in an attempt at creating a modern and hygienic city. This project seeks to come to terms with the often contradictory views of animals at the time and understand how they contributed to the transformation, disappearance and emergence of the shared life world of humans and animals.