HCTS successful with three internationalization projects

Starting from Winter Semester 2020, the HCTS will strengthen its international profile thanks to a series of collaborations with international scholars, who will be hosted for a semester or longer at one of the HCTS´s professorships.

Anthropologist
Tarini Bedi, associate professor at the
University of Illinois, Chicago, will initiate a four-year collaboration with the HCTS professor of
Visual and Media Anthropology, Christiane Brosius, in the areas of mobility studies, urban transformations, and media. Professor Bedi´s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of urban and political anthropology, anthropology of infrastructure, roads and mobilities, cultural geography, and gender studies. She is also a fellow of
Tasveerghar, the digital archive of South Asian popular visual culture founded by Christiane Brosius together with
Sumathi Ramaswamy, HCTS associate member and professor of History at
Duke University, and independent filmmaker
Yousuf Saeed.

The collaborations hosted at the
Chair of Cultural Economic History, led by professor
Harald Fuess, will serve to strengthen the HCTS connection to Yale University in the fields of history and society. The expected outcome is the implementation of a major international conference on Japanese history in a global context, planned for autumn 2021. Among the guest scholars will be anthropologist
Gabriele Koch, assistant professor at the
Yale NUS College, who will join the HCTS in the Summer Semester 2021. Professor Koch, author of the volume “
Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy,” is specialised in the critical study of gender and sexuality, labour, and political economy in Japan; she will be teaching a class on gender within the M.A. Transcultural Studies. Other scholars from the
history department of Yale University and the
Council of East Asian Studies are expected to take part, too.

Beginning from 2021,
Barbara Mittler, co-director of the HCTS and professor of
Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University, will be hosting
Peidong Sun, associate professor of History at
Fudan University, Shanghai, and currently visiting scholar at
Sciences Po in Paris. An expert in global reading practices, politics of fashion, and marriage laws, professor Sun has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley and is presently working on a book titled “Underground Reading of the Sent-down Generation: History and Memory of the Cultural Revolution.” She will be offering courses in cooperation with
CATS and the
Institute for Political Science of Heidelberg University.