The 2026 Fudan-Cambridge Global Humaniti es Conference was held at Fudan University, from 11 to 13 September 2026. An important event in Fudan and Cambridge’s collaboration through the Global Humanities Network, the conference explored the theme “The Pre-modern in the Post-Modern: Global Humanities and the Transmission of Ideas”, examining how pre-modern texts, objects, practices and epistemologies circulate through, and are reactivated within, the frameworks of post-modern global humanities.
Scholars from the University of Cambridge and the University of Leeds in the UK, and from Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Sun Yat-sen University, Nankai University, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai Normal University and other institutions in China, came together to discuss the development of global humanities, the transmission of ideas across regions and dialogue among civilisations.
Professor Chen Zhimin, Vice President in charge of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Fudan University, delivered opening remarks. Welcoming the participants, he stressed that the humanities can transcend divides of time, geography, language and culture, helping people understand contemporary society and approach the future with foresight.
Since its founding in 1905, Fudan has upheld its deep-rooted humanities tradition. Its participation in the Global Humanities Network has helped the two universities move from dialogue to sustained scholarly exchange.
Hans van de Ven, Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge and a distinguished Sinologist, delivered opening remarks in which he traced the origins of the Global Humanities Network and discussed the contemporary importance of humanities collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries.
He noted that the humanities worldwide face challenges including funding cuts and external political pressures, and that the collaboration between Fudan and Cambridge clearly demonstrates the core mission of humanities scholarship in safeguarding humanity’s shared cultural heritage.
Ge Zhaoguang, Distinguished Senior Professor at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Department of History at Fudan University, delivered a keynote speech entitled “An Ancient Map and Three Renaissances: A Discussion of a Proposition Regarding the Histories of Islam, China, and Europe”.
Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Acquiring and Imagining Writing in the Premodern West”. Focusing on early medieval Ireland and Britain from the fifth to the seventh centuries, she examined how the technology and materiality of writing were imagined and articulated.
Zhang Xiaohong, Professor at the Institute of Chinese Historical Geography at Fudan University, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Natural Disasters, Local Memory, and the Production of Historical Texts: A Case Study of Shui Gua Xi Baotou”. Through a study of a flood in Baotou during the late Qing period, she showed how the production of historical texts was a differentiated process involving multiple actors.
Dror Weil, Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Articulating Nature: Circulating Ideas in the Global Middle Ages”. Focusing on medieval Eurasia, he explored how people understood, articulated and presented their own and others’ experiences of the natural world.
Professor Yin Jie, Vice Dean of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, moderated a forum discussion entitled “The Premodern traits/ethos in our Postmodern life: reflection on / highlight of global humanities in the 21st century”. Participants reflected on global humanities in the twenty-first century through the pre-modern traits that persist in post-modern life.
Elizabeth Monier, Assistant Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, noted that pre-modern political orders centred on traditional loyalties and religious and local identities.
Jessica Patterson, Assistant Professor in the History of International Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, argued that conventional historical periodisation inherited nineteenth-century Western assumptions about linear progress.
Professor Bao Huiyi of Fudan University drew on the Roman myth of the goddess Cura to explore the concept of cura, arguing that care is central to being human, rather than a burden to be eliminated. She showed how medieval practices of manuscript copying, map-making and the pursuit of truth embodied care, and proposed “I care, therefore I am” in place of “I think, therefore I am”.
Three thematic panels were held on the afternoon of 12 September, chaired respectively by Professor Bao Huiyi, Associate Professor Zhu Lianbi and Associate Professor Liao Jing of Fudan University.
The panel themes were “Global Movements of Pre-modern Knowledge and Material Transmission”; “The Pre-Modern—Conceptualisation, Construction, and Critical Reconsideration”; and “Arab-Islamic Civilisation—Intellectual Heritage and Global Transmission”.
Three postgraduate workshops followed on the morning of 13 September, chaired respectively by Professor Bao Huiyi, Associate Professor Zhu Lianbi and Professor Zhang Xiaoyan.
Miranda Griffin, Professor of Medieval French Literature at the University of Cambridge, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Travels in Space and Time: Landscape, Literature, and the Premodern”. Taking the twelfth-century lai (short narrative poem) Guingamor as her case study, she explored how reading premodern literature could be a form of time travel. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s work, she reflected on historical periodisation and showed how literature and place shape our sense of time.
Emma Cayley, Professor of Medieval French at the University of Leeds, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Interrupted landscapes: the Leeds Lancelot fragment and the Digital Humanities”. Taking the Lancelot fragment discovered at the University of Leeds as her case study, she explored how fragmentary form shapes our understanding of texts and landscapes.
Sandro Jung, Fudan Distinguished Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Fudan University, delivered a keynote speech entitled “Literature and the Gendered Transmission of Ideas: Women Making Late Eighteenth-Century Silkworks”. He explored literary silkwork pictures as a medium of transmission and considered how women makers’ interventions shaped meaning and expressed gendered agency.
As the conference drew to a close, student and faculty representatives shared their reflections. Student representative Tao Weiyi drew on her summer school experience to explore the relationships between water resources, literature, archaeology and local cultural memory in discussing “water, climate and global humanities”. She noted that face-to-face intercultural exchange helps cultivate intercultural empathy and can enable short-term academic programmes to give rise to lasting scholarly friendships and collaboration.
Associate Professor Wang Tao, also a faculty representative from Fudan’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature, drew on his experience as a visiting scholar at Cambridge to discuss how the cross-regional and integrative approaches to classical Chinese literature adopted in British academia could inform specialist research.
He focused in particular on how highly specialised research on classical texts could be framed in terms of broader questions about human experience for discussion within the global scholarly community. He also stressed the irreplaceable value of insights gained through direct participation in academic life and face-to-face exchanges with fellow scholars.
Faculty representative Professor Yang Junlei of Fudan’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature reflected on her exchange experience at Cambridge. She emphasised that global humanities should transcend national and disciplinary boundaries and connect historical, spatial and temporal perspectives.
She also proposed bringing global humanities resources into engineering education, using interdisciplinary dialogue involving literature, science fiction and engineering imagination to develop future engineers’ grounding in the humanities, imagination and long-term perspective.
Professor Lu Li’an of Fudan University delivered the closing remarks, thanking all the participating scholars. She noted that the collaboration between Fudan and Cambridge goes beyond producing tangible scholarly outcomes. The international scholarly community jointly built by the two universities also provides an ongoing platform for communication, fostering sustained academic exchange, mutual trust and friendship.
