Center for Global Studies

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China's Global Implications: The Past and Present of European Debates

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Center for Global Studies
Location
306 Coble Hall and on Zoom
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Mar 5, 2025   12:00 pm  
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmaier holds a chair professorship in “Modern China with a Special Emphasis on Global Historical Perspectives”.
Registration
Register here for the webinar
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Originating Calendar
Center for Global Studies: Events

Abstract: This talk reflects upon China as a contested concept in European intellectual and political life. While paying much attention to Germany, it also touches upon other European examples; it also raises the question of transnationally or even globally circulating narratives at key historical moments between the Enlightenment period and the present. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples, it explores how China figured both as a subject of intellectual curiosity and a globally relevant power. The talk then develops some ideas on the broader social and political environments of China as an embattled object of thought. In this context, it discusses how shifting geopolitical conditions and political transformations in various European countries have impacted perceptions of China. It also takes factors like sociologies of knowledge, patterns of ignorance and shifting politics of the self into the picture.

Bio: Prof. Dr. Dominic Sachsenmaier holds a chair professorship in “Modern China with a Special Emphasis on Global Historical Perspectives”. Before coming to Göttingen in 2015, he held faculty positions at Jacobs University, Duke University as well as the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his education at Freiburg University, St. Andrews University, Nanjing University and Harvard University. Sachsenmaier’s main current research interests include China’s transnational and global connections in the past and present. Furthermore he has published in fields such as Chinese concepts of society, the global contexts of European history and multiple modernities. For instance, he authored the monographs “Global Perspectives on Global History” (Cambridge UP, 2011), and “Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled” (Columbia UP, 2018). In addition to his academic publications, Sachsenmaier has also written for newspapers ranging from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to the Singapore Straits Times. Moreover, he has delivered a wide range of talks and keynote speeches, both in academic settings as well as at other institutions. Sachsenmaier serves on several editorial and advisory boards in Asia, Europe and the United States; he is one of the three editors of the book series „Columbia Studies in International and Global History“ (Columbia UP). From 2014 to 2022, he served as the president of the US-based Toynbee Prize Foundation (where he continues being a board member). He is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.

https://www.sinologie-goettingen.de/en/department/person/prof-dr-dominic-sachsenmaier/

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