13th Spring History Symposium: Making Modern Identities

13^th Spring History Symposium

Making Modern Identities

The Department of History at the University of Hong Kong is pleased to host the 13th Spring History Symposium at HKU on 3 and 4 May 2024.

The theme of this year’s Symposium is Making Modern Identities. The modern era has given rise to myriad systems for categorising and identifying individuals and groups and has provoked new thinking about the self and the place of the individual in society. Identities can be formulated from within as a process of self definition by individuals and communities, but they can also be imposed by one group upon another. Just as the philosophies and technologies of the modern era have provided individuals with the means to articulate their own identities in changing ways, they have also increasingly enabled states and institutions to recognise, categorise, and track those individuals. Identities interact in complex ways — overlapping, conflicting, combining and constantly in flux. The 13th Spring History Symposium will explore the modern era’s many multiple and overlapping formulations of identity.

Keynote

Biology and the Categories of Modern Identity

Keynote Speaker: Philippa Levine

Philippa Levine is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.  She has written on the history of feminism, of socially transmissible diseases, prostitution, reproduction and eugenics as well as the British Empire. She is currently completing a book on nakedness.

Discussant: Elizabeth LaCouture

Programme Director, Gender Studies Programme, HKU

Associate Professor, Gender Studies Programme and Department of History, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts

Venue:

University of Hong Kong, Centennial Campus

Faculty Academic Conference Room, 4.36, 4/F Run Run Shaw Tower

and

CPD-2.58, Central Podiums Level, (2/F Jockey Club Tower)

Time: 

Friday, 3 May 2024, registration begins 8:30 a.m.

Saturday, 4 May 2024, registration begins 8:45 a.m.

Registration: 

All are welcome. Registration is required.

For more information and to register, please visit our website: shs.history.hku.hk

Or register directly here: forms.gle/WbGb2bT7NYJnYGKj9

The Symposium has been supported by the Postgraduate Students Conference / Seminar Grants of the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong.