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Category Archives: Cultural Engagement Partnerships

BICC and Needham Research Institute: Joseph Needham Collection Now Online

Posted on 30 June 2016 by Gordon Barrett

Dr. Gordon Barrett

The Joseph Needham collection of photographs and journals from the Second World War is now available on the Cambridge University Digital Library website: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/needham

CUDLThis is the first time that much of this material has been available online in high resolution thanks to the talented team in the University Library’s Digital Content Unit, who digitised hundreds of pages and photographs as part of this project. This material even includes photographs of Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to the Chongqing Mining and Industrial Exhibition in 1944!

JN-CKS

While UL’s DCU team was working on the digitisation, the Needham Research Institute Librarian John Moffett and I were busy updating and extensively editing a range of supplementary information in both English and Chinese to accompany the photos and journals. This includes edited transcriptions for the journals detailing three of Needham’s tours visiting universities, research institutes, schools, and factories across ‘Free China’. For the journal pages, transcriptions can easily be accessed via the ‘View More Options’ dropdown menu.

JN-Journal

Since it’s now possible to simultaneously search both these transcriptions and the photo descriptions, this means that you can view photos and read journal entries related to the same episode or event. For example, if you’re interested in Needham’s earliest meetings with Zhu Kezhen (竺可桢), the eminent Chinese meteorologist and long-serving president of Zhejiang University, a simple search for his name will let you not only read about them in Needham’s journal but also see his photos of Zhu speaking to members of the Science Society of China in 1944.

I am currently working on the edited typescript for Needham’s final, Northern tour, and further supplementary material is going to be made available in the future making the collection even more accessible and easy to use. Plus, this wartime collection is just a starting-point, with plans afoot to digitise even more material relating to Joseph Needham’s life and work.

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

The first year of ‘British Born Chinese’

Posted on 1 March 2016 by Elena Barabantseva

‘British Born Chinese’ was launched with a premier screening in Manchester in April 2015 to enthusiastic reception from the audience captured in this audio-video collage.  Since then, the film has been shown in China and Europe. In September 2015 the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations hosted an evening screening of the ‘BBC’. In November 2015,DSC_6597 the film was screened at the Minzu University of China in Beijing (the main national university for ethnic minorities in China),  featured in the ‘Happenings’ programme of the Bookworm Bookshop in Beijing and Suzhou, and included in the programme of the 6th Athens Ethnographic Film Festival.

DSC_6678Following the screenings in UK and China, the film received favourable reviews in national and international media.

China-UKtimes

Film review: British Born Chinese – a marriage of cultures in Manchester | Mancunian Matters

EuropeTimes review

BBC-British Born Chinese-2177[1]In February 2016 ‘British Born Chinese’ was screened as part of the LSE ‘Food for Thought’ Literary festival.

The podcast with post-screening discussion (with Veronique Pin-Fat, Anna Chen, and Elena Barabantseva) is available for downloading.

On March 28 2016 the film was screened as part of the special programme at the 19th World Film Festival in Tartu (Estonia).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Cultural Engagement Partnerships, Models of Distinctions, Networks, University of Manchester

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

Posted on 14 January 2016 by sarahcoakley

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 Cultural Engagement Project- The British Library

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BICC Cultural Engagement with the British Library

In October 2015, Amy Jane Barnes will commence a three month BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership at the British Library. During the course of this project she will catalogue the Library’s collection of Chinese propaganda posters, as well as investigate opportunities for its digitisation and display online.

Prior to this appointment, Amy was employed by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester as a Research Associate and has, in the past, worked in various capacities within the School and the wider University, and as a freelance researcher, curator and editor.

She completed her AHRB/C-funded PhD in the School of Museum Studies in 2009 and graduated in 2010. She has a background in Asian Art History and was formerly Curatorial Assistant at the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art (2000—1).AX0A0136

Amy’s doctoral research looked at the collection, interpretation and display of the visual culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in British museums. A monograph, Museum Representations of Maoist China, which is based on this work, was published last year (2014) by Ashgate.  In addition to a number of other writing projects, she is currently collaborating on the development of a Leicester Reader in Heritage and Interpretation.

 

 

Posted on 17 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

BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership @ the University of Bristol

Posted on 23 January 2015 by Robert Bickers

Applications are invited for this short-term post, to commence at a mutually agreed date in the first half of 2015 under the direction of Professor Robert Bickers, at the University of Bristol. The aim of this initiative is to support individuals working on three-month ‘Cultural Engagement projects’ with a non-university partner, allowing early career researchers who have just completed a PhD in a Chinese studies field to gain experience of working in or in collaboration with a non-university partner. This could involve working on a discrete research project, or outreach initiative, preparing some work to support a forthcoming, or on-going exhibition etc.

The post would formally be held at the University of Bristol, and the post-holder would be styled as a BICC Early Career Researcher but could be physically based anywhere in the UK. There is a modest budget for travel. Applicants should provide a c.v., as well as an expression of interest including an outline project description, and a letter of support from the identified cultural sector partner. ‘Cultural sector’ is very broadly conceived, and could include museums, libraries, creative sector SMEs, or other public or third sector cultural or civic organisations, etc. The post is likely to be restricted to areas that fall within the purview of the British Inter-university China Centre, that is, that require Chinese language skills and Chinese studies training.

Duration: Three (3) months full-time or six (6) months at .5 FTE
Salary: £30,424, pro-rata.
Start date: to be agreed.

How to apply: An expression of interest (including an outline of the proposed project), letter of support, and c.v., should be emailed to Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol, by 16 February 2015: hums-bicc@bristol.ac.uk

One reference in support of the applicant should also be received by the same date by email. A completed PhD is preferred, but applicants who have submitted their thesis for examination will also be considered.

Applicants may be called for interview in late February.

Exceptionally, two of these short-term appointments may be made should there be sufficiently strong proposals.

Posted in Announcement, Cultural Engagement Partnerships, University of Bristol

Dr Diana Yeh writes about her Penguin Books China Cultural Engagement Partnership

Posted on 2 April 2014 by Robert Bickers

penguinAs a scholar working on the Chinese in Britain, I was excited to embark on BICC’s knowledge exchange partnership with Penguin Books China, researching Penguin’s UK back catalogue of works on China and China-related themes from 1930s to the 1960s. These Penguin first editions encompass an extraordinary array of novels, poetry, reportage and non-fiction for adults and children, from Pearl Buck’s classic The Good Earth (1960) to the notorious Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1938) and lesser known works of forgotten writers such as Winifred Galbraith and Tsui Chi.

Thanks to the Penguin Archive at Bristol University, I was able to unearth the genesis of Penguin’s acquisition of the books and piece together its role in sustaining and shaping knowledge of China in Britain during these decades. My own research has focused on constructions and contestations of Chineseness by examining how migrant Chinese artists, whose lives spanned Britain, Italy, South Africa, China and Taiwan from the 1930s to the present day, negotiate identity and belonging in diaspora.

hsiungs

Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, c. 1935–36. Photo: Chidnoff

Of particular relevance to the Penguin project is the world of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain. Shih-I rose to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first Chinese director to work in the West End and on Broadway. In 1952, Dymia became the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish in English a fictional autobiography, Flowering Exile. In The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong University Press, 2014), I recover the Hsiungs’ lost histories and discuss the challenges they faced in representing China to the rest of the world and becoming accepted as modern subjects, at a time when knowledge of China and the Chinese was persistently framed by colonial legacies and Orientalist discourses.

While my analysis focused on how the Hsiungs’ success was shaped by unfolding socio-economic, cultural and political circumstances, the Penguin project allows me to locate their works in a literary context. Ernest Bramah’s series of Kai Lung stories (1936–38) and China muckraker Samuel Merwin’s fantastical tale of China, Silk (1942), highlight the popularity of chinoiserie that helped propel Hsiung to fame. It was also interesting to compare Hsiung’s limited success with his play The Professor of Peking (1939), which focused on the political realities of China during the warlord period to American Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Edgar Mowrer’s Mowrer in China (1938), a report of the unfolding war in China, published as a Penguin Special.

happyhsiungsIn the Happy Hsiungs, I detail how Dymia Hsiung’s Flowering Exile, a story of her family’s life in Britain from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, was criticized by the press at the time as ‘prosaic’ when compared to other contemporary tales of a ‘China of legend’ that captured ‘the strangeness and the charm of that fabled land’. Yet, if Penguin’s output is anything to judge by, stories of journeys in the opposite direction, from Britain to China, remained popular. While Ann Bridge’s Peking Picnic (1938) and The Ginger Griffin (1951) are both set in the foreign legations in Beijing, Denton Welch’s autobiographical Maiden Voyage (1954) charts his escape from school in England to Shanghai where he was born. Meanwhile, Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies (1950), a satire of the foreign community in republican-era Peking, has recently been described by contemporary Penguin author Paul French as ‘the wittiest and best observed novel of the period, and the one that best encapsulates the goldfish bowl world of the privileged’ in China.

storyofmingIt was also fascinating to explore the works of Chiang Yee and Tsui Chi, who were close friends of the Hsiungs and shared their homes in Hampstead and Oxford. Both wrote for adult audiences and Chiang Yee was popularly acclaimed for his Silent Traveller series, but wrote children’s books for Penguin’s first children’s series – the Puffin Picture Books. While Chiang Yee illustrated his own Lo Cheng: The Boy Who Wouldn′t Keep Still (1942) and The Story of Ming (1944), Tsui Chi collaborated with the illustrator Carolin Jackson for his The Story of China (1945).

Other notable highlights of the collection include feminist adventurer Alexandra David-Néel’s My Journey to Lhasa (1940), an account of her extraordinary 2000-mile journey on foot to the forbidden city. Disguised as a beggar and accompanied by a novice monk whom she later adopted, she arrived in Lhasa in 1924, winning her accolades as the third European to reach the city in the twentieth century. Equally remarkable is the life of Winifred Galbraith, a missionary teacher who repeatedly defied orders from the British authorities to leave China during Mao’s attempted Autumn Harvest Uprising. Her book, entitled (not without protestation), The Chinese about ‘the nature of the civilization on which China is building her new society’, was published by Penguin as a Pelican in 1942.

Disputes between Penguin editors, notably in the acquisition of Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1938) – and negotiations between editors, authors, translators and illustrators – account for and shaped Penguin’s varied output on China and China-related themes during this period. Such contestations in the construction of China and Chineseness, of course, continue today.

In March 2014, supported by BICC, I gave a series of talks in China about the intersections of the Penguin China project with my research on the lives of the Hsiungs, at the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing and Suzhou and at the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai. I also discussed both projects in the context of my current research on contemporary youth identity formations at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. As Penguin China approaches its tenth year anniversary, plans are afoot to feature some of these early Penguin writers on China in a forthcoming touring exhibition in Asia. Such projects promise to contribute to the vital task of widening knowledge of and reflecting on British–Chinese relations both historically and in the present day.

Dr Diana Yeh will be taking up a position as Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Winchester in June 2014.

 

Posted in BICC Researchers, Cultural Engagement Partnerships, University of Bristol | Tagged cultural engagement partnerships, Penguin
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  • Introducing Dr Rachel Silberstein
  • BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership at the John Rylands Library – David Woodbridge
  • BICC and Needham Research Institute: Joseph Needham Collection Now Online
  • Public Talk and Keynote speech China in Britain: 1760 to 1860, with Dame Helen Ghosh, Director-General of the National Trust
  • BICC Manchester Chinese for Academic purposes week

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