Call for Papers: 14th Spring History Symposium
May 9, 2025 - May 10, 2025
Call for Papers: 14th Spring History Symposium, HKU, 9 and 10 May 2025
The Department of History is pleased to announce that the 14th Spring History Symposium will take place at the University of Hong Kong on 9 and 10 May 2025 and will provide a venue for postgraduate students and early career scholars to share their research and form connections with an international community of historians.
The theme of this year’s Symposium is “Global Encounters: Bodies, Commodities and Technologies on the Move.” The modern world has been and is increasingly shaped by cross-border movements. In most cases, people serve as the agents of such movements. People of various occupations, including intellectuals, merchants, diplomats, soldiers, missionaries, craftsmen, and artists, among others, and encompassing those of diverse gender, race, and national identities, in crossing paths with each other beyond borders, have sparked some of the most significant creations and conflicts in history. The web of global movement, however, extends beyond people alone. Business exchanges and the quest for scientific knowledge, as common interests shared around the world, have mobilized and redirected human efforts with remarkable momentum, forming extensive networks often unnoticed by people within them. Commodity circulation and the dissemination of science and technologies thus provide new vantage points from which to observe and re-examine historical linkages that were previously ignored and to rethink the meanings of global encounters.
The organizers of the 14th Spring History Symposium call on postgraduates and early career scholars to submit proposals about global encounters and movements, focusing on both human stories across various sectors and those narratives where commodities and technologies take center stage. We particularly encourage studies exploring topics with links to Asia from the 18th century onward.
To apply, please submit an abstract of between 200 and 300 words and a 1-page CV via the form on our website: shs.history.hku.hk. Abstracts and CVs should be combined into a single pdf document labeled in the following format: Familyname_Givenname_shs14 (ex: Lei_Boyun_shs14). The deadline for submission is 31 January 2025, and applicants will be notified of the results in February. All papers must be presented in English.
For more information, please visit our website: shs.history.hku.hk. And please direct any enquiries to Ms. Iris Boyun Lei at hkuhistorysymposium@gmail.com. Thank you.
Yours Sincerely,
The Organizing Committee of the 14th Spring History Symposium