National Endowment for the Humanities hosts joint US-China Forum

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the independent federal grant-making agency that supports research, education, and public programs in the humanities, will host a U.S.-China Cultural Forum at NEH offices in Washington, D.C. on April 10.

The forum, “Cultivating Collaboration: Bridging Cultures through Humanities Research and Innovation,” will bring scholars together from the United States and China in a daylong series of roundtable discussions and plenary sessions on international collaboration in the humanities. The forum, the fourth in a series, aims to encourage the development of joint projects that engage the research and teaching interests of humanities scholars in the U.S. and China.

“NEH recognizes the importance of international collaboration in many spheres of humanities research and has designed the forum, in partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Culture, to highlight successful models of collaboration and encourage new efforts to pursue shared interests in fields ranging from scholarly translation to digital humanities to online education,” said NEH Assistant Chairman for Partnership and Strategic Initiatives, Eva Caldera, one of the lead organizers of the forum.

The conference will feature noted scholars from the United States and China:

• Peter Bol of Harvard University and Liu Dong of Tsinghua University will give the keynote addresses.  Peter Bol is Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning.  He is one of the professors behind ChinaX, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that provides students with a comprehensive overview of over a millennium of Chinese history and has reached thousands of students worldwide.  Liu Dong is the Vice Dean of the Academy of Ancient Chinese Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University. He is a widely published scholar and has translated works by authors such as Max Weber, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.   
• Chen Pingyuan from Peking University, Jamie Monson of Macalester College, Marvin Bolt of the Corning Museum of Glass, and Lu Jiande, the Director-General of the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Science will discuss the experience and results of international collaborative projects.
• Lou Wei, Deputy Director of the Palace Museum of China, and Leslie Bowman, President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundations, Inc., will share highlights of collaboration in exhibitions.

The afternoon program will consist of breakout sessions on Scholarly Translation, Big Data and Digital Humanities, and Online Education, led by U.S. and Chinese scholars.  These sessions are designed to foster discussion between the panelists and the audience with the aim of opening new avenues for collaboration in the humanities. See the full program for more detail.

The forum will also feature presentations from two students, one from China and one from the U.S., on the value of studying other languages and cultures.

Registration is free and open to the public, closing Wednesday, April 8 at 3:00 p.m.  For more information or to register, please visit the conference website: http://www.neh.gov/events/2015/cultural-forum.