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Category Archives: Public Engagement

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Public Talk and Keynote speech China in Britain: 1760 to 1860, with Dame Helen Ghosh, Director-General of the National Trust

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A public Talk by Dame Helen Ghosh Director- General of the National Trust at Manchester University.

China held a distinctive place in the European consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this was no more apparent than in the country houses and gardens that would come into the hands of the National Trust in the 20th and 21st centuries.  At times admiring of China’s 4,000 year lineage of society, ethics and traditions, while at other times dismissive of a culture whose artefacts and their collection were viewed as no more than a “deviant obsession”, the British reflected their own ideas of China in the objects they bought and commissioned from the East.  Dame Helen will discuss the influence that this fascination with China and Chinese objects has had upon the National Trust’s places and collections, and the people that shaped them, using case studies to draw attention to the complex and lasting impact of China in Britain.

Helen Ghosh 931

A short biography:

Dame Helen joined the civil service from Oxford University, where she read modern history.  During her civil service career, Helen worked in a wide range of Government departments, working on a range of social policy issues, including child poverty, asylum and immigration, and local community regeneration.    She also worked on key environmental policies, including climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the protection of habitat for endangered species.   In the 1990s and early 2000s, Helen worked at the heart of Government, in Cabinet Office, advising on efficiency and propriety issues.    She spent seven years as a Permanent Secretary (CEO) in two departments, Defra and Home Office.    In late 2012, Helen moved to become Director-General of the National Trust, where her interest in history, people and places, and her commitment to the environment come together.

For tickets please click here to register.

 

Posted on 27 April 2016 by sarahcoakley

BICC Public Event, Manchester- The Bellot Collection. Public event, 12th February 3-5pm.

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Thomas Bellot

 

Bellot Collection

 

Born in Manchester (1806), Thomas Bellot served in the Royal Navy as a surgeon during and after the first Opium War in China. He acquired a collection of Chinese bronzes, coins, books and manuscripts which are now deposited in the Manchester Museum, Manchester City Library and the John Rylands Library.

These objects have recently been examined by the British Inter- University China Centre (BICC). This public event will showcase some of his collections and discuss their significance to Manchester and the study of Britain and China.

– Collecting on Campaigns – Britains China Eye Poster

 

Posted on 8 February 2016 by sarahcoakley

BICC and Needham Research Institute: ‘Chinese Wartime Science’ Exhibition in Bristol and Project Update

Posted on 20 January 2016 by Gordon Barrett

Dr. Gordon Barrett

‘Chinese Wartime Science Through the Lens of Joseph Needham’ will be coming to Bristol on 6-7 February 2016. This pop-up exhibition will be displayed as part of the Bristol Museum and Gallery’s Chinese New Year festivities on 6-7 February 2016. I will also be on hand that weekend to answer questions and to give more information about our digitisation project launching soon on the Cambridge University Digital Library (CUDL).

The exhibition proved very popular when it was on display in September as part of Open Cambridge 2015. The Needham Research Institute welcomed about 70 members of the public who got to see the ‘Chinese Wartime Science’ exhibition, tour the NRI’s unique building and library collection, and attend a trio of talks given by the NRI’s librarian, John Moffett, and myself.

‘Chinese Wartime Science’ previews a selection of the material that will be available through the CUDL starting in April. This will include over 1,200 photographs and Joseph Needham’s diaries detailing his travels criss-crossing ‘Free China’ during the Second World War. Together, these provide a rich portrait of science, education, and everyday life in wartime China.

Since July, John Moffett and I have been working on this project with the Cambridge University Library’s crack team of digitisation specialists, who have created beautiful high-resolution digital versions of the photos and diaries. I have substantially updated and edited typescripts for the diaries detailing three of Needham’s cross-China journeys, which will appear on the CUDL alongside images of the original pages.

So be sure to visit the Digital Library in April to check out this fascinating collection, made possible by the BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership, and if you are in Bristol during the first weekend of February, please do visit us at the Bristol Museum and Gallery!

Posted in BICC Researchers, Cultural Engagement Partnerships, Events, Public Engagement, University of Bristol

Manchester University- The story of China with Michael Wood

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THE STORY OF CHINA- a six part BBC series with Manchester University Professor Micheal Wood. BICC member Yangwen Zheng collaborates and appears in episode 5 and 6.

STARTING THURSDAY 21st JANUARY 9PM BBC TWO

THEN EVERY THURS FOR 6 WEEKS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fyFIrN55Hks

Posted on 14 January 2016 by sarahcoakley

PG Course in Chinese for Academic Purposes with BICC Manchester

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BICC Manchester is pleased to announce that there will be an opportunity for PG students in the China field to take part in a one week Chinese for Academic Purposes course in Manchester April 2016.  The course aims to further practical applications of Chinese language in academic work and is open to students who have a good level of Chinese, or who work in the China field.

chinese classes

The funding has been made available thanks to SOAS and its application for HEFCE funding, in partnership with Manchester University. Due to the funder’s requirements, the course is open to UK/EU students. The bursary covers travel and accommodation and the course itself is free of charge to all PG students who fit the criteria.

 

PG students who are interested or who would like further information should apply to sarah.coakley@manchester.ac.uk and request a leaflet to be sent electronically with the details and application prodecure. The deadline is the 30th January 2016.

 

Posted on 10 December 2015 by sarahcoakley

The Launch of Disasterhistory.org

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Disasterhistory.org

Pierre Fuller

Web searches remain the predominant avenue for non-academic researchers seeking historical data or contextualisation. Yet online searches on the major topics that I have been researching and publishing on for years – famine, earthquakes and other types of disaster in East Asia – continue to produce next to nothing of much value or depth when performed by the general user (outside, that is, the subscription-walls of Jstor and other academic platforms). So a couple of years ago I held a workshop at Manchester where about a dozen historians from several continents were able to attend. What came out of it was the goal of making up-to-date and reliable information on the subject of disasters in Chinese history, currently beyond the reach of many outside academia, freely available online. We designed and built the site over the year, and a couple of us flew to a conference of anthropologists of disaster in Chengdu last month to formally launch DisasterHistory.org.
Some users have described the site to me as a welcomed public service, but all involved also stand to benefit: making the research conducted here at Manchester and by colleagues around the world more easily accessible simply makes our work more relevant. That can only be a good thing. As for how soon the site will be high in Google hits? That’ll come with time.

More than any other academic project I’ve worked on, DisasterHistory.org is all about colleagues volunteering their time and work. It grew out of a research network funded by the British Inter-University China Centre, and for the moment, the team of historians contributing are limited to those who have worked on disasters in Chinese history, but we hope to soon expand our content to cover other parts of the globe, to include other disciplines, and to use other languages, Chinese especially – although each of these (considering the complexity they add to site construction and functionality) might have to wait until a second stage of funding. For now I’m hugely grateful for colleagues, currently spread out in the UK, the US, Finland and China, for their ideas and contributions.

But there is another added dimension that I’m particularly excited out. With additional financial support from the University’s Learning Enrichment Fund, last spring I incorporated an optional disaster research project into the course work for my first year module Modern China, with the idea that, subject to review by an expert in the field, student work could help populate the site with articles on more obscure disasters; the work of six UG (plus 2 PG) students now appears on the site, which is a great chance for students to showcase their work online, and for the site to broaden its coverage.

pierre fuller

As it grows in time as an informational platform and collaborative space, DisasterHistory.org should facilitate scholarly engagement with journalists and other professionals, possibly policymakers and practitioners, and the general public, while helping to shape future research questions and fostering projects that will meet practical and pressing needs beyond the academic world. We hope to build collaborative, data-pooling and data-mapping features into the site in order to foster opportunities for co-production of research by scholars worldwide, for example, on death counts and mortality rates, which in the case of famine are notoriously unreliable.

 

Better not to end on that depressing note, though. I encourage anyone with work that might be related to disasters (broadly-defined) in any discipline, or who might know a colleague-friend who does, or anyone with ideas on any type of collaboration, to be in touch as we move into our next stage!

 

Posted on 3 December 2015 by sarahcoakley

BICC and Manchester Museum- The Bellot Collection

Posted on 28 October 2015 by sarahcoakley

The aim of the British Inter-university China Centre (BICC) Cultural Engagement Postdoctoral Fellowship at Manchester Museum is the study of the Chinese bronzes belonging to the Bellot Chinese Collection at Manchester Museum.

These bronzes were collected by Thomas Bellot (1806-1857) when he was serving as a surgeon on the HMS Wolf during his stay in China just after the Opium Wars. They were later inherited by his brother William Henry Bellot (1811-1895), and afterwards by Bellot’s grand-nephew Professor Hugh Hale Bellot (1890-1969), who then donated them to the Manchester Museum in 1969. The Bellot Collection was then divided into a collection of ancient Chinese books and personal manuscripts held in the Manchester City Library and the bronzes and coin collections stored in the Manchester Museum.

For this project I will focus on making a comprehensive study of the 52 bronze pieces that comprise the Bellot Collection at Manchester Museum. Particularly, I intend to find out where in China the bronzes were originally retrieved, and deduct their possible contextual origin. Moreover, I will elaborate on Bellot’s personal connection to these items. In that sense, I am mostly interested in what this collection can tell us about Bellot both as a collector and as an Englishman engaging with China right after the Opium Wars.

For its modest size, the Bellot´s collection is exceptionally diverse. The main body of the collection is comprised of around 30 artifacts of religious character, such as ritual vessels, vases, bells and incense burners. Among them, the most striking ones are two sets of gu 觚 and hu 壶 vases, as well as some ding 鼎 and jue 爵vessels, decorated in a style reminiscent of Shang dynasty (c.1500-1050BCE) bronzes. However, these pieces do not seem to me as datable to the Shang period, due to the lack of corrosion and to their overall good state of conservation. Most probably they are replicas forged during Ming (1368-1644) or even early Qing dyansty (1644-1839). I expect to provide a more accurate dating in the course of my research.

Apart from these items, Thomas Bellot also collected 9 statues and figures of different sizes, which seem to be mostly related to Buddhist religious rites. Among them there are some of the most remarkable items in the collection, such as an 18″ high statue of a man. The infant traces in his expression and the hairstyle make me assume that it could be Ne Zha 哪吒, a mythical figure in Chinese Buddhism, known for being born as a complete adult. Overall, it is still too early to confirm that all of the figures were retrieved from temples, as some of them might be of secular origin, and one of the pieces might not even be Chinese. Tracing the origin of the pieces is one of the next steps in the analysis of the items.

In order to meet the above objectives I will engage with other archival documents related to the Bellot Collection. I will first consult the Bellot Papers preserved in the John Ryland’s Library, as they are a good source of information about the Bellot family’s relationship with these bronzes and their origin. Secondly, I will analyse the Bellot Chinese Collection at Manchester City Library in a hope that it can provide further information about the Bellot’s own motivation for collecting these bronzes and the rationale behind it.

Apart from the analysis of the archival documents, I will focus on the epigraphical analysis of the bronzes. This could provide extremely relevant information about their original usage and the context in which they were retrieved. Having done the preliminary examination of the collection, I was able to use the inscriptions found on some of the mirrors to date them back to the mid-16th century. Moreover, the inscriptions on other trays and vessels indicate that they were produced around the mid-15th century. These inscriptions would confirm that most of the items in the collection were forged during the Ming dynasty; however it is still too early to come to this conclusion. I expect that the study of all the epigraphical evidence on the bronzes will shed more light on this matter.

About me

Dr José Antonio Cantón Álvarez

I obtained my PhD  in History at the University of Granada. My research interests include international trade between China and South-East Asia during the Ming and Qing dynasty; the opium trade and its consumption in South, Southeast and East Asia before the Opium Wars; traditional Chinese medicine; the history of drug consumption in Asia; the history of European colonialism in Asia; the introduction of American crops to China and the Taiping Rebellion among others. My doctoral thesis is based on an original, in-depth analysis of primary sources in classical Chinese, Portuguese and English regarding this period.

Jose A Canton - profile picture

Most of this research I conducted while being a visiting researcher at Renmin University of China (RUC), for which I secured funding from Hanban’s Confucius China Study Program, under the supervision of Prof. Huang Xingtao, Dean of the RUC’s School of History. My thesis is an original and ground-breaking research project presenting new findings on the changing role of opium in inter-asian trade, its use by European traders and colonizers in Asia from the 16th to the early 19th centuries, and its impact on China. I have already published an article in Spanish in a peer-reviewed international journal stemming from my thesis, and have recently submitted an article on the changing role of opium in Chinese medicine during the Ming dynasty. In addition to this, my interest in other aspects of late imperial Chinese history has led me to publish a monograph on the Taiping Rebellion and a book chapter about the Self-Strengthening Movement, both in Spanish. I am currently researching the role of opium in Chinese international trade from the Song to Ming dynasty, the introduction of the opium poppy in Chinese medicine during the Tang and Song dynasties and the impact of the opium trade on the politics of Macao during the 18th century.

 

 

Posted in Introductions, Public Engagement, Simply interesting, Uncategorized, University of Manchester

BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership: Maoist posters at the British Library.

Posted on 28 October 2015 by sarahcoakley

Dr Amy Jane Barnes

During my three months at the British Library, I aim to catalogue the Library’s collection of Chinese propaganda posters from the 1950s to 1980s and research several academic papers, as well as investigate the possibilities for digitising and making the collection more accessible to a wider audience. The project also gives me the opportunity to develop my Chinese language skills, albeit a very specialist vocabulary relating to revolutionary ideology! The first week of the project was predominantly taken up with induction-related activities, sorting out IT access, getting to grips with collections procedures, meeting my new colleagues and investigating the collection in the British Library stores with curator Emma Goodliffe – we found lots of things we were expecting, but a few we weren’t, including an exquisite set of revolutionary nian hua (年画, “New Year’s prints”) dating from 1950. From an initial estimate of around 40 posters, we eventually located over 70. And there are many plan chest drawers still to investigate, so we may yet turn up even more! With the formalities out of the way, towards the end of the week I started to photograph, research and catalogue the collection. The posters may be organised thematically – there are examples of public information posters, posters relating to the Mao cult, nian hua ‘catalogue’ posters, so-called ‘chubby baby’ posters and a fair number of anti-Gang of Four cartoons and caricatures. But I have begun with a group of posters which depict scenes from feature films and model operas. Amy picture first blog In order to catalogue the items, I am making a record of materials, measurements and content, as well as noting down the condition of each poster and highlighting those that might need the attention of a conservator. I have also been making rough translations of the text that appears on the posters – the types of information we need in order to determine the identity of potential copyright holders, such as publishing houses and distribution companies. My knowledge of Chinese (and set of Pleco flashcards) is expanding exponentially. Over the next few weeks I intend to continue to photograph and catalogue each item in the collection. Then begins the exciting work of researching them in depth. Dr Amy Jane Barnes

Posted in Cultural Engagement Partnerships, Public Engagement, Simply interesting, University of Bristol

BICC working with with The National Trust

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Dr Paul Bevan is a Research Associate and Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he teaches courses in the History and Culture of China and Classical Chinese. He has taught Modern Chinese Literary Texts at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Oxford where he recently completed a 14-month period as Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham College.

Paul obtained his PhD from SOAS in 2012 with a dissertation entitled Manhua Artists in Shanghai 1926-1938: From Art for art’s sake to Wartime Propaganda. His wide-ranging research interests include the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican period and the study of inscriptions on eighteenth-century art objects. In the latter capacity he has translated all inscriptions on Chinese art objects in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen soon to be published as part of a three-volume catalogue. He has also acted as Historical Consultant for the Royal Geographical Society and as Ethnographic Consultant for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. He recently completed a year as Edison Visiting Fellow at the British Library where he worked on a project entitled “Classical Music in the Jazz Age.”

Paul’s forthcoming book A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 is soon to be published by Brill, Leiden. In this book Paul explores how the cartoon (manhua) emerged from its place in the Chinese modern art world to become a propaganda tool in the hands of left-wing artists. The artists involved in what was largely a transcultural phenomenon were an eclectic group working in the areas of fashion and commercial art and design. The book demonstrates that during the build up to all-out war with Japan the cartoon was not only important in the sphere of Shanghai popular culture in the eyes of the publishers and readers of pictorial magazines but that it occupied a central place in the primary discourse of Chinese modern art history.

Paul has also worked extensively as a musician and his engagement with eighteenth-century European music, both as a researcher and performer, informs his studies on the history of art during this period.

The project so far

As British Inter-University China China Post-doctoral Fellow and Consultant I am working with the National Trust and the University of Manchester on a project concerning two eighteenth-century clocks in the collection of Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire.

The history of these impressive objects, which I’m now in the process of unravelling, is both fascinating and complex. One of these clocks, known at Anglesey Abbey as the “Pagoda Clock”, has recently been carefully and painstakingly conserved by the clocks department at West Dean.

During the conservation process several small scraps of paper thought to be from a Chinese newspaper were found in the clock. They had been used as padding to pack the enamel panels found on the clock, possibly to secure them in transit. The discovery of these scraps of paper was taken as proof that the clock had spent some time in China.

From what I’ve been able to discover in the first stages of the project, it can be shown that another clock, described in the National Trust collection as the “Tower Clock”, also spent some time in China. Whilst examining the clocks with Christopher Calnan of the National Trust, we found, scratched crudely inside the clock, two Chinese characters, no doubt inscribed to identify the panels when the clock was being assembled. One of these characters very clearly reads you 右(right) and the other, which is much less clear, appears to read shang 上(upper); together they translate as “upper right”. The histories of both the Tower Clock and the Pagoda Clock form the basis of the research project.

By deciphering the text on the scraps of paper found in the Pagoda Clock, it has been possible to estimate the time when the clocks were last in China. Three different types of paper were found in the clock. These pieces are really nothing more than scraps and there is a strong possibility that the three types of paper were used by clock repairers at different times. The pieces of paper are

Letter Paper- These two small scraps of off-white paper do not tell us anything significant about the history of the clock as there are only two characters, written in ink, found on one of the pieces and a minute fragment of another single character on the other. The readable characters are si jiao 四角 (‘four corner’ or ‘corner four’) and may have been written on the paper simply to indicate that this was to be used to repair ‘corner four’ of the clock.

Scraps from a Single Sheet-  No complete sentence can be found here, but it has been possible to identify the origin of the woodblock printed sheet by the vocabulary used. There are two possibilities: either it is part of a leaflet giving the instructions for a type of lottery popular at the end of the nineteenth century, or it is part of a lottery ticket itself. The lottery, known as Weixing 闈姓, required the player to guess the family names of the candidates put forward for the imperial examinations and the order in which they would be placed in the exam. This type of lottery was particularly popular in Southern China in the 1880s and 1890s. It came to an end when the Chinese civil service examination system was disbanded in 1905. These scraps of paper do not tell us all that much about the clock except that it was in China during the late nineteenth century.

Newspaper- The scraps of newspaper are clearly of a later date as can be seen from the type of print used and the vocabulary found within the text. However, these also present problems, as again, no complete sentence is decipherable. The actual date of the newspaper is not shown on any of the fragments, so dating the scraps has had to be done with reference solely to the vocabulary.

The earliest year in which the newspaper could have been published is 1912; the year of the founding of the Chinese Republic. This can be seen from the official title Guowuyuan 國務員 and related terms, found within the various fragmentary sentences. The latest possible date can also be deduced from the vocabulary and this is October 1914; the year that Shuntianfu 順天府 (Shuntian Prefecture), as mentioned in the text, was abolished as an administrative unit.[1]  After this time it became the Jingzhao difang 京兆地方 (Capital district); part of the city of Beijing.[2] Of course this method of dating is by no means fool proof as the text could be referring to events which had occurred before the time of publication but I would suggest it is likely to be more or less accurate and, after all, at this stage it is all we have to go on.

This has been the first step in a long process in discovering the history of the clocks at Anglesey Abbey and when they were last in China. More on this and on how I have been able refine these dates further will appear in my next post.

1] Zhongguo lishi diming cidian 中國歷史地名辭典 (Dictionary of Chinese Historical Place Names). Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1986, p. 651.

[2] Dong, Madeline Yue: Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Posted on 28 September 2015 by sarahcoakley

BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership – The Needham Research Institute

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Needham 1 needham2  In early July, I began work at the Needham Research Institute  in Cambridge, which holds a unique collection of material relating to the life and activities of Dr Joseph Needham (1900-1995). He was a noted biochemist whose varied career went on to included holding prominent posts at the University of Cambridge, acting as the driving force behind putting the ‘S’ in UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and dedicating the latter half of his life to the history of science in China, particularly through his Science and Civilisation in China project.

Between 1943 and 1946, Dr Needham crisscrossed war-torn China as director of the British Council-sponsored Sino-British Science Cooperation Office (SBSCO). Through his travels, he developed relationships with hundreds of Chinese scientists as he visited the universities, laboratories, and factories in which they were attempting to continue work and research under extraordinary conditions. Dr. Needham and the SBSCO sought to support their work and strengthen Sino-British scientific links. They arranged to have scientific equipment, foreign scientific journals, and other materials brought into China via the treacherous Burma Road and flown in by the RAF, as well as sending Chinese scientific journals overseas and helping get Chinese research published in Western journals.

 

What Are We Up To?

Thanks to the BICC’s Cultural Engagement Partnership, I am working with the NRI’s Librarian, John Moffett, on a series of activities that focus on Joseph Needham’s wartime activities in China. The first is a major digitisation project that will make a collection of material freely available in high resolution via the Cambridge Digital Library. During his travels, Dr Needham took and collected over 1,200 photos, as well as keeping a series of incredibly detailed travel dairies and sketchbooks.

BICC Needham

Together, these give us a fascinating and unique portrait of his own journeys and life throughout ‘free China’, from the country’s wartime capital, Chongqing (Chungking), to remote villages in the Gobi desert and research stations in Sichuan Province. Along the ways, he got to know numerous important Chinese politicians and scientists, such as Zhu Kezhen (Coching Chu). His journeys not only intersected with those of British diplomat and explorer, Eric Teichman, as well as radical New Zealander, Rewi Alley, an important figure in the ‘Gung Ho’ Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the war who went on to become one of the People’s Republic of China’s most famous ‘foreign friends’. This collection will also be of interest to anyone interested in the history of organisations like the China Inland Mission  or Friends’ Ambulance Unit.

Our project will be bringing the whole collection together in one place – and make it all available in high resolution – for the first time. We’re also creating a bunch of new material that will help make this collection even more engaging and easy to use, including indexes of people, places, and institutions, as well as updating and editing transcripts of the dairies. This should all be available in the early New Year. In the meantime, you can see a selection of Dr Needham’s dairies and photos online thanks to the International Dunhuang Project, while lower resolution versions of Dr. Needham’s wartime photos are currently available via Visualising China.

We’ve also been hard at work preparing some free public events. On Saturday, 12 September, the Needham Research Institute will be taking part in the Open Cambridge weekend for the very first time. We’ll be a holding trio of talks about Dr Needham’s time in China during the Second World War, along with tours of the beautiful NRI building and its East Asian Science Library. More details can be found here.

Those joining us on 12 September will be the first people to be able to see our new ‘pop-up exhibition’, Chinese Wartime Science Through the Lens of Joseph Needham, featuring highlights from the Needham wartime collection. This exhibition has been designed to travel, so it’ll likely be popping up in other places, including Bristol, later in the autumn and New Year. We’ll keep you posted!

 

Who Am I?

My doctorate in history at the University of Bristol focused on the intersection of international science and Chinese foreign relations. That project looked at Chinese scientists’ state-sponsored international activities in the early decades of the Cold War, particularly their evolving interactions with organisations such as the World Federation of Scientific Workers, at events like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, as well as with individual scientists in the West, particularly those in Britain. This BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership project with the NRI has been an opportunity to make use of my own research background and interests while helping increase awareness about and widen access to the NRI’s fascinating archival collection.

BICC Cultural Consultant

I’ve been very lucky to be based in the Department of History while at Bristol, in no small part because it is deeply involved in public history in its many forms, from projects like Know Your Bristol and Impact of Conflict, right up to the new Hong Kong History Project. As a Deas Scholar, I’ve had the chance to help out with many aspects of the department’s annual Past Matters Festival of History, which includes a whole range of different public events, which have included not only lectures and film screenings, but also neighbourhood and family history days.

I’ll be writing more posts with updates about what we’re up to and the latest developments as I get further into this BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership project with the Needham Research Institute. In the meantime, do be sure to join us in Cambridge on Saturday, 12September  to see first-hand what we’ve done so far.

Posted on 7 September 2015 by sarahcoakley

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