Department of History, The University of Hong Kong
SPRING HISTORY SYMPOSIUM
Past Continuous:
Historical Narratives from Modernity to the Contemporary
In today’s world, globalization is facing enormous challenges: trade wars, genocides, anti-immigration sentiments, the destabilization of global institutions herald in the decline of mutual understanding and co-operations. The gaps between economic and cultural capitals, gender, race, class, borders and religions are deepening. In times like this, it is important to cultivate a stable point of reliance and resilience. Searching for a way through, historians inevitably look towards the past: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” such is the tried-and-true cliché. Languages and dialects signal our sense of belonging to a group or communities; literary tropes reveal our deepest dreams, hopes, fears, angers and longings; while history unfolds non-linear trajectories that help us revise, rehearse and re-shape personal and collective stories with each and every advance of the contemporary momentum.
The 15th Spring History Symposium invites postgraduate students and early career researchers from around the world to grapple with questions that have been challenging historians from modernity to the present. We welcome works that produce, employ and engage with robust modes of historical research focusing on events and movements (dis)connecting Asia with the world from the 18th century onwards. Possible topics include, but are non-exhaustive:
-
Intangible ideas, tangible institutions
-
History of knowledge and technological transfer
-
Borders and migration; revolutions and reforms
-
Race, ethnicity, gender and marginalized communities
-
Childhood, life cycle, medicine and the natural world
-
Trauma and memories; public and oral history
-
Alternative archives, interdisciplinary historiography
Keynote Lecture
Sino-Southeast Asia’s Blue-Water Embrace: A Millennial Horizon, 600-1600 CE
Thursday, May 7, 2026
09:15–10:45 CPD 2.58
This talk examines how diasporas, trade, and networks of interaction developed in the “adolescence” of Sino-Southeast Asian contact, in the time-period roughly covered by the thousand years between 600 and 1600 CE. We know very little about the “infancy” of these dealings, in the years before the T’ang. But by that dynasty, patterns of contact slowly began to develop on a more systemic basis, particularly with some of the coastal landscapes of Monsoon Asia, into and including the Indian Ocean. I examine the growth and eventual flourishing of these interactions, especially through the power of commercial networks focused on certain specific commodities, and try to situate them in the larger milieu of what is often called the “maritime silk road”. By focusing on export ceramics heading south, and marine biota heading north, we can learn much about how networks actually "worked" on the oceanic pathways of Asia.
Lecturer
Eric TAGLIACOZZO
John Stambaugh Professor of History
Director, Southeast Asia Program (SEAP)
Cornell University
Discussant
Devika SHANKAR
Assistant Professor of History
University of Hong Kong
Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell. He is the author of a history of smuggling in Southeast Asia (Yale, 2005) which won the AAS’s Harry J. Benda Prize in 2007, a monograph on the pilgrimage to Mecca from that region (Oxford, 2013), and a history of oceanic connections in Asia writ-large (Princeton, 2022). He is also the editor or co-editor of a dozen other volumes on a variety of trans-national topics in Asian History, including the Asia Inside Out trilogy from Harvard University Press. He is the Director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), and serves as one of the two editors of the journal INDONESIA. He was also previously the co-director of the Migrations Initiative at Cornell, a large program funded by the Mellon Foundation on global migrations.
Devika SHANKAR is an assistant professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests primarily lie in environmental history, legal history and science and technology studies. She is the author of An Encroaching Sea: Nature, Sovereignty and Development at the Edge of British India 1860-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) which looks at the history of coastal erosion and port development in southwestern India. She has also written separately on property rights, princely sovereignty, and infrastructure development in the context of South Asia and the Indian Ocean.
We look forward to seeing you in HKU in May!
Our symposium is open to the public for registration. All the speakers and participants are required to register before attending the symposium. Registration will be closed by May 6, 18:00. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us via the email below.