Dr Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong (University of Ghana) & Prof Lucy Delap and Dr Ruth Watson (History – University of Cambridge)

The proposed project emanates from an ongoing collaborative discussion in post-graduate
teaching at the University of Cambridge and the University of Ghana. At Cambridge, the aim is
to contribute to the “World History” programme, especially the “Crowds in World History”
option. This project proposes to use “crowds” as a trope to explore movements such as social
movements, student movements, women’s movements, and anti-colonial movements in twentieth
and twenty-first century Africa. “Crowds” is considered in this sense as fuel to agents of social
change, a catalyst to individuals and groups seeking to engage in contentious politics.
Historically, the African continent has experienced different shades of contention within the
timeframe adopted by this project. These include “crowds” engaged in civil disobedience in
Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda, to armed struggles in Algeria, Kenya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe,
to contemporary movements such as the “Arab Spring” and “RhodesMustFall.” This project
aims to explore pertinent issues and theoretical considerations in the study of the history of
contentious politics in Africa. Discussions will focus on how individuals and groups experience, approach and navigate problems of agency, power, exploitation, gender, knowledge production, and social change.
This project seeks to:
• Explore the various historiographical, theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches in writing social movement history, especially in the field of African history.
• Redefine the African past through the lens of Africans.
• Recognize the ubiquitous nature of “crowds,” and how global interactions have shaped Africa.

Dr Carolina Gainza Cortés (Diego Portales University) & Prof Stephen Cave (CFI – University of Cambridge)

Project Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a sociotechnical phenomenon that redefines how societies imagine and govern the future. Its governance frameworks—developed by the European Union, the United States, China, and international organizations—reflect distinct sociotechnical imaginaries that encode values, worldviews, and geopolitical interests. Yet these imaginaries often reproduce asymmetries between the Global North and South, leaving limited space for alternative visions of technological development.
This visit aims to foster a North– South dialogue on AI governance and technodiversity—the coexistence of multiple epistemologies and moral orders in technological design (Hui, 2020)—through scholarly exchange between the University of Cambridge and Universidad Diego Portales (UDP, Chile). The collaboration builds on the research project Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence (Fondecyt Regular 2026) and contributes to the creation of a UDP Center for Transdisciplinary Studies on AI, Humanities, and Society, inspired by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI).
Objectives:
1. Engage with Cambridge scholars in debates on sociotechnical imaginaries and AI governance,
emphasizing the geopolitics of collaboration between the Global North and South.
2. Learn from LCFI’s institutional model to design the UDP center as a national, and eventually
regional, research Center for Transdisciplinary Studies on AI, Humanities, and Society.
Planned Activities:
• Deliver a public talk titled “AI Governance and Technodiversity in Latin America.”
• Participate in seminars and research meetings with LCFI and related Cambridge units, such as AI-FAR and GAIN.
• Identify shared research lines and future co-teaching or publication opportunities.
• Draft a joint concept note outlining potential collaborative projects and network-building strategies.
Expected Outcome:
The visit will establish a foundation for sustained collaboration between Cambridge and UDP, leading to
future research proposals, joint teaching initiatives, and comparative studies on the cultural and
geopolitical dimensions of AI.

Prof Ning Sun (Fudan University) & Prof Michael Potter and Prof Alexander Bird (Philosophy – University of Cambridge)

This visit has three objectives. First, the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge has a long and distinguished history, with many renowned scholars, especially Prof. Michael Potter and Prof. Alexander Bird, who have deep expertise in analytic philosophy. Through this visit, I hope to learn from them while presenting several research projects I am currently developing to my colleagues at Cambridge and receiving their feedback. Second, the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge and the School of Philosophy at Fudan University have an excellent relationship. The Head of the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge visited Fudan last year, and we discussed preliminary plans for cooperation. This visit aims to strengthen our connection further, particularly to discuss possible arrangements for enhanced exchange between students and scholars from both institutions. Third, I am currently also the Executive Director of the Dewey Center at Fudan University. My research expertise lies in classical pragmatism, neo- pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and the history of American thought. During this visit, I also hope to visit the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, where pragmatism is a major research theme. I hope to explore further opportunities for collaboration.

I have already arranged the specific details of the visit with the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. My host at Cambridge will be Prof. Michael Potter, and I will visit during Michaelmas Term 2026. During the two-week visit, I will give two academic talks and hold faculty meetings with both the Faculty of Philosophy and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science to discuss specific matters of collaboration.

Prof Han Zhaoqing (Fudan University) & Dr Zhang Ling (FAMES – University of Cambridge)

The Kangxi-era Map of the Complete View of the Imperial Territory (《康熙皇舆全览图》, Kangxi huangyu quanlan tu) is the earliest extant official map of China produced with modern surveying techniques, compiled between 1708 and 1719. It stands as a monumental work in the history of Chinese and world
cartography and serves as an important testament to Sino-Western scientific cooperation 300 years ago.
This research constitutes an essential component of the National Social Science Fund Major
Project, “Genealogical Maps of the Kangxi-era Huangyu quanlan tu: Collation and Research in
Domestic and Foreign Collections.” The project aims to systematically trace the transmission
history of the various editions of this map and to investigate its influence on Chinese cartography,
both within China and internationally, over the past two centuries. This research requires
extensive consultation of English-language editions of Chinese maps, which are extremely scarce in China. To my knowledge, the University of Cambridge holds a substantial collection of historical
maps, of which only about one-tenth is currently accessible online; access to these holdings will allow me to identify and compare versions not preserved in China, and this collection is of irreplaceable value to my research and therefore requires on-site consultation.
Furthermore, this research requires a global historical perspective. Prof. Ling Zhang enjoys international renown in this field. It would be a great honor to consult Prof.Zhang and other
distinguished scholars at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in order to broaden my
global historical perspective.
Therefore, I plan to visit the University of Cambridge for three weeks to conduct library-based
research and to engage in academic exchanges with Prof. Zhang and her colleagues. In addition, I
will deliver a lecture for students titled “Geography and Space: Cartographic Traditions in China.”

Dr DeVan Ard (American University of Beirut) & Dr Philip Knox (English – University of Cambridge)

Translanguaging is a theory about the linguistic capacities of bilingual and multilingual speakers that has gained wider scholarly support over the past two decades. The theory holds that there are not two “interdependent language systems that bilinguals shuttle between, but rather one semiotic system integrating various lexical, morphological, and grammatical linguistic features.” Though translanguaging has been applied primarily to linguistics research, it also has the potential to re-shape the way we read, study, and teach multilingual literatures.

Dr. Philip Knox (King’s College, Cambridge) and Dr. DeVan Ard (American University of Beirut) are scholars of medieval literature. We propose to collaborate in the development of a research and teaching framework for multilingual literary texts from the Middle Ages, with a focus on texts that point toward shifting notions of identity and community in this period. We believe that, in a time of intense globalization and normative multilingualism beyond the Anglo-American academy, the archive of medieval literature has the potential to speak to readers who wish to connect their experience to a longer history of linguistic hybridity and literary experimentation.
Dr. Knox has extensive expertise in French-English literary transmission, dialectal variation in Chaucer, and in translation; he is also an editor of the journal New Medieval Literatures (Boydell and Brewer). Dr. Ard is an assistant professor working on a book about translingual lyric and liturgical culture; his teaching and writing focus on religion and literature in the trans-Reformation (1300-1550) period. He also brings to this project, and to the Cambridge community, his experience of teaching in Lebanon’s vibrantly translingual society, and can speak to how translingual readers encounter texts and negotiate identity through linguistic choice in the classroom. Through this collaboration, we hope to push our discipline, medieval literary studies, toward fuller engagement with the multilingual cultures and practices of the present. Together we will take up questions such as: How does medieval glossing (Latin-vernacular, English-French, etc.) or macaronic poetics compare to code-switching and translingual writing? Are these similar cognitive or creative acts? How does a translingual reading environment shape the reception and preservation of texts? How do practices of translingual performance or song compare to similar practices in the contemporary Lebanese context (translanguaging in theatre and music)?
Objectives:
• to develop a conceptual framework for teaching and research on translanguaging in different periods;
• to design a graduate seminar/module on “Translanguaging and Literary History” that pairs case studies from vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages with global and contemporary writing; Sara Vogel and Ofelia Garcia, “Translanguaging,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, ed. G. Noblit and L. Moll (Oxford 2017);
• to workshop papers on translanguaging for the upcoming New Chaucer Society Congress in Freiburg, Germany (July 2026);
• to produce a co-authored article or edited collection proposal.
Proposed activities (Easter Term (April-June) 2026):
• co-teach a two-hour workshop primarily for MPhil. students, incorporating undergraduates if they like, on translanguaging in the Middle Ages;
• co-organize a research seminar inviting participation from cross-disciplinary, cross-period specializations, including colleagues in linguistics and modern languages. Funding for some speakers to attend and refreshments from the King’s College Fellows’ Research Workshop Fund (up to £2k); shared, pre-circulated reading and short, five-minute papers from selected participants situating their own research in relation to the topic; potential participants: Ad Putter (English, King’s College Visiting Fellow ET 2026); Godela Weiss- Sussex (Modern German, UCL / King’s College, Cambridge); Bert Vaux (Linguistics, King’s College); Nicolette Zeeman (English, King’s College);
• Dr. Ard will attend medieval studies research seminars at Cambridge;

Dr. Ard’s visit to Cambridge in Easter Term 2026 will lay the foundation for a reciprocal visit by
Dr. Knox to the American University of Beirut the following year. This exchange will give AUB
access to Cambridge’s extensive community of medievalists, enabling us to offer a more globally
connected humanities education. In this way, it will support the Center for Arts and Humanities’
emerging research cluster on multilingualism. The graduate module we design together can be
adapted and taught at both institutions, creating a model for comparative translingual pedagogy
that could be shared across the Global Humanities network. Looking further ahead, we will explore joint applications for external funding to support a network centered on translanguaging that brings together scholars working on multilingual literatures across periods and regions.

Dr Tianyi Zhang (Nanjing University) & Prof Lydia Hamlett (PACE- University of Cambridge)

This project re-examines women’s art in the first half of the twentieth century—
centrally WWII—through a comparative, transnational lens that places Chinese women artists, especially those with European training or exhibition experience, in dialogue with their European contemporaries. Drawing on feminist art history, mobility studies, and global art history, it investigates how gendered authorship, displacement, institutional constraints, and propaganda shaped visual vocabularies across the East Asian and European fronts, and how women artists negotiated media, audiences, and professional networks under crisis.
Over a 4-week visit, I will undertake object-based study at Cambridge’s Murray Edwards College Women’s Art Collection—focusing on posters, prints, paintings, and ephemera that illuminate cross-front resonances and divergences—consult artist files and exhibition histories, and hold targeted
conversations with curatorial and archival staff to refine case studies and comparative criteria. In collaboration with the Institute of Professional and Continuing Education, we will align research outputs with professional/continuing-learning audiences via a focused workshop. The visit will include a research talk for the host department and the co-design of a graduate mini- seminar on “Gender, Mobility, and Wartime Visuality,” piloting comparative methods for joint teaching.
The objectives are: (1) to build a curated comparative corpus that maps transnational networks – training routes, exhibition circuits, and periodical exchange—linking China and Europe; (2) to complete a co-  authored article advancing a global account of women’s wartime visual culture; and (3) to produce an open, bilingual mini- dataset and teaching module to support sustained collaboration. As follow-on, I will outline a joint grant/exhibition concept leveraging Cambridge collections alongside Chinese case studies. By anchoring close looking and pedagogy in Cambridge’s holdings, with IPCE engagement for outreach and professional learners, the project positions Chinese women artists within a global wartime ecology and lays the groundwork for durable partnerships between Nanjing University and Cambridge.

Dr Pingping Jia (Nanjing University) & Prof Brechtje Post (MMLL – University of Cambridge)

Prosody is key to how multilinguals coordinate multiple linguistic systems.
However, studies on heritage languages have focused on segmental features,
while prosodic elements remain underexplored. This project investigates how
Mandarin speakers with different linguistic backgrounds resolve prosodic
conflicts during code-switching, offering new insights into the cognitive dynamics
of bilingual speech.
Mandarin third-tone sandhi, a low-contour tone (T3) shifting to a rising tone (T2)
when preceding another T3, serves as a window into prosodic planning. Pilot
observations indicate that native Mandarin speakers (NSs) apply sandhi before
both English and German iambic words (e.g., hǎo, háo professor ‘good
professor’, háo Figùr ‘good figure’), suggesting that prosodic well-formedness is
preserved across languages. However, German learners of Mandarin (FLs)
often avoid sandhi but adjust the stress pattern of the following word (e.g., hǎo
Fìgur), revealing distinct strategies influenced by linguistic background.
Heritage Mandarin speakers (HSs), who acquire Mandarin at home but have
another dominant language, provide an ideal group for exploring how bilingual
experience modulates prosodic processing. Nevertheless, behavioral data from
English-dominant HSs and FLs remain limited.
Objectives
– Determine whether HSs adopt tonal repair (NS-like), stress adjustment (FL-like), or hybrid strategies.
– Examine the mechanisms underlying prosodic conflict repairing during code-switching.
– Advance theoretical models of interaction among prosodic features.
Plan of Activities
– Finalize experimental design with Prof Brechtje Post.
– Conduct experiments with English-dominant FLs and HSs.
– Participate in teaching the Experimental Phonetics and Phonology seminar to MPhil in Linguistics and Language Sciences students.
– Present interim findings in the Phonetics and Phonology seminar and attend
the weekly meetings.
– Attend CamPAL meetings (the Cambridge Language Processing and Learning group).
Working at DTAL provides access to Cambridge’s theoretical expertise and
participant community, fostering research that advances humanities-based
inquiry into how language, cognition, and culture shape the prosodic identities
of multilinguals.

Dr Nie Fei (Nanjing University) & Prof Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (University of Cambridge)

Intellectual Rationale:
Manuscripts constitute fundamental archives of human civilization, yet scholarly
engagement with Western and Eastern manuscript traditions has remained largely
segregated within discrete philological paradigms. This project transcends such
methodological limitations by developing a systematic comparative framework that
analyzes standardized textual formulas and formulaic expressions to illuminate
underlying ritual practices and cultural worldviews across civilizational boundaries.
By integrating textual, visual, and material approaches, this research investigates
the social formations embedded within manuscript cultures, thereby opening
innovative pathways for cross-cultural manuscript studies and fundamentally
reconceptualizing our understanding of textual materiality across diverse
civilizational contexts.
Early China offers an exceptionally rich manuscript corpus extending from the late
Shang period (c. 1400 BCE) through the Qin-Han dynasties (220 CE),
encompassing canonical literature, administrative documentation, medical treatises,
and quotidian records. These materials provide both textual and iconographic
evidence while maintaining genealogical continuities with medieval manuscript
traditions—most notably the Dunhuang corpus (600-900 CE)—thus establishing a
comprehensive foundation for systematic East-West comparative analysis.
Objectives:
(1) Establish sustainable academic partnerships between Cambridge and Nanjing
Universities, fostering collaborative research across textual studies, theoretical
frameworks, comparative linguistics, and digital humanities methodologies;
(2) Utilize “formulaic patterns and conventional expressions” as analytical
frameworks to examine how manuscript structures reflect and encode social ritual
practices and intellectual paradigms of both Western and Eastern manuscripts;
(3) Investigate the dynamic interrelationships between textual content, material
presentation, and sociocultural function within Western and Eastern manuscript
traditions.
Plan of Activities:
(1) Conduct intensive comparative manuscript research and convene specialized
academic seminars during the Cambridge residency (1-2 weeks);
(2) Develop collaborative scholarly publications for peer-reviewed academic
journals, with initial intensive collaboration (1-2 weeks) and potential for sustained
long-term partnership.

Dr Abraham Lincoln Nutsugah (University of Ghana) & Dr Frisbee Sheffield and Prof James Warren (Classics – University of Cambridge)

The proposed research collaboration explores community building in Plato’s Laws. This text is
relatively under-explored in comparison to Plato’s Republic, and yet it is a rich resource for
thinking about Plato’s politics. The core research question is how Plato develops a robust civic
culture and resilient networks of partnership in the community of Magnesia. Much of the work is
concerned with the enabling conditions of civic life, including educating citizens such that they are
motivated to adhere to the law, fostering ties of friendship between citizens in a range of communal activities, and mobilising shared experiences to forge a sense of community. Though recent scholarship has explored the interpersonal relationships of philia (friendship) between citizens, and how that supports other legislative goals in Magnesia, the proposed project is distinctive in its search to examine the social infrastructure of Plato’s Laws, i.e. the organisations, places and spaces
of the city.
This project will identify the essential public and private spaces required for community formation
in Plato’s Magnesia. Analyse how housing arrangements and urban planning are designed to
achieve the city’s communal goals. Evaluate how the strategic planning of the built environment supports the cultivation of virtue as the central aim of the Laws and to clarify the nature of
Magnesia’s social infrastructure, the conditions that are required for it to succeed, and how it
supports the overall legislative project of Plato’s Laws. Attention is turned towards infrastructure and the built environment because this enables the connectedness and shared experiences, which allow citizens to develop a sense of themselves as a community and foster a sense of belonging.
This project will be executed by undertaking dedicated archival work in the Classics Faculty and
other historic college libraries. I plan to attend numerous ancient philosophy lectures in the Faculty
of Classics, and to consolidate my learning of ancient Greek by attending the weekly reading
seminar.

Dr Sura Qadiri & Prof Charles Forsdick (University of Cambridge) and Dr Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (AUB)

The English Department at AUB is home to experts in a variety of world literatures, including francophone and Arabic language literatures. Though the focus is on French in my Cambridge department, research and teaching interests span a global range of literatures and critical and theoretical approaches.
Increasingly in my research and teaching, which focuses on francophone literatures form North Africa and the Middle East, I seek to signal the multilingual vibrancy of these spaces, attempting to model a wider linguistic perspective that can be taken by non- specialists of Arabic language literature. The aim is to give as broad a view as possible of the literary landscape of the region. My collaborator, Dr Sonja Mejcher-Atassi takes a similar approach, though from the perspective of a specialist in Arabic literatures.
Dr Mejcher-Atassi has invited me to lead an online session on francophone literature next Spring
as part of her Capstone postgraduate teaching series. She will in turn be visiting Cambridge in March
2025 for a book launch at AMES, and this will give us an opportunity to plan an exchange. The exchange
will enable me to make a two-week visit to AUB alongside my Head of Department, Professor Charles
Forsdick. We will offer presentations based on our current research and take part in workshops for postgraduate students on francophone literature from North Africa and the Caribbean. My talk will be based on my forthcoming book, Postsecular Poetics: Reading Religion in French and Francophone Literature and will be on ‘Building Diverse Community Through Literature.’ Professor Forsdick will present on disciplinary trends in the UK, opening up an opportunity for discussion on the shape and value of literary studies and the humanities more broadly in our respective institutions. The activity complements developments in the area of Francophone postcolonial studies associated with the Global Humanities Initiative and funded by an award from the professorial support fund made to Professor Forsdick and Dr Doyle Calhoun.

Prof Rita Kothari (Ashoka University) and Prof Charles Forsdick (University of Cambridge)

I made a three week visit to University of Cambridge and optimized my time there by meeting several people and giving multiple talks. My host Prof Charles Forsedick (Department of Medieval and Modern Languages) organised two public lectures for me. The first one was held on 20th May where I spoke on “A Multilingual Nation: Language and Translation Dynamic in India.” It was attended by over twenty people and there was a discussion that some young fresh Ph.D students had with me. One of them, Dr. Aliya Ram, was in the process of finishing her postdoctoral tenure and will soon be joining UCLA. She and I will be collaborating over a chapter in an edited volume I am doing with Laura Brueck and Christi Merill from United States. During the first talk I also met Prof Angeles Carreres who has begun the Cambridge journal of literary translation. I am now on the advisory board of the journal. Dr Carreres will also translate into Spanish my book Uneasy Translations. 

Meanwhile, Prof Charles Forsedick represents the Cambridge Network of Translation Studies and I am now a part of it. When I gave my second talk on 27th May (based on Gandhi’s autobiography) it was attended by Sareena Meer whose mother Fateema Meer was Gandhi’s biographer in South Africa. We formed a very good connection with each other. Two young researchers Jusmeet Sihra (a student of Christoph Jaffrelot) and Priyanka Kottamaraju (a student of Manali Desai) attended both my talks and spent time with me discussing their research and possible collaborations. Prof Aishwarj Kumar, who teaches Hindi literature at the School of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages attended my talks, and invited me home. He also hosted a third talk which was titled “Ellipsis and Caste in Indian Literature.”  

During the three weeks of Cambridge and a highly active and intellectually charged period, I was also a guest of University of Glasgow which I visited and gave a talk on “ Translation : Experience and Epistemology.” I met many faculty colleagues there who are keen to collaborate with Ashoka University. We have had some meetings with University of Glasgow but we can take the communication to the next level of signing an MOU. Incidentally, Prof Manali Desai, Chair, Humanities at Cambridge is also interested in a collaboration that is more specifically focused on gender studies. I had a really productive meeting with her. Prof Charles Forsedick and I would also like to co-organise a conference on translation with other partners (especially the one in Chile). Prof Aishwarj Kumar will be attending the bhashavaad and moderating a session there. Given such a short duration of my visit, I believe it has been an extremely fruitful visit and I am thankful to the institutional support I have received. Feel free to reach out to me for anything you wish to develop further.

Dr Mohammad Amir Hakimi Parsa (Ashoka University) and Prof Assef Ashra (University of Cambridge)

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the concept of kingship in Iranian history. However, scholars have usually limited their scope to one of three historiographic periods: the Safavid (c. 1500-1700), the 18th -century interregnum, or the Qajars (c. 1800-1900). In contrast, we seek to examine the evolution of kingship in Iran across the early modern era as a whole. Our two sets of expertise complement one another in such a way as to make this collaborative project feasible. While Assef Ashraf is a specialist on the early Qajars, my focus is on the preceding Safavids and the 18th century, so that our combined expertise covers the early modern period as a whole. The collaboration will also rely on our complementary linguistic skills. Dr Ashraf’s command of chancellery Persian,
alongside my knowledge of (Qizilbash) Turkic, will be crucial for understanding the Turco-Persianate discourse of kingship in early modern Iranian sources. Furthermore, our methodological approaches mean that we can pursue a multifaceted analysis of our subject; Specifically, Dr Ashraf’s work on Iran’s Persianate traditions of court ritual and historiography complements my own work on Iran’s Turco-Mongol traditions of court ritual and epigraphy, allowing us to make sense of the discourse of Iranian kingship within an integrated Turco-Persianate framework. The immediate result of the project will be a jointly authored peer reviewed article, envisioned as the first of several on early modern Iranian kingship.

This collaborative project will facilitate long-term institutional connections between Cambridge and Ashoka. As I am currently in the process of establishing a centre for Persianate studies at Ashoka, the formation of closer academic and personal contacts with leading Persian scholars such as Assef Ashraf and Christine van Ruymbeke will be indispensable for the success and growth of that centre as a global institution. I intend to discuss future collaborative projects with scholars at AMES and the role they can play in our upcoming conferences and workshops, such as the international conference “Persia in
the Mirror of Mughal India” that we will be holding in Delhi in May 2026. Thus, the project will facilitate the entry of AMES scholars into the burgeoning scholarly networks on Islamic studies in India.
Furthermore, one of our main aims at the Persianate centre at Ashoka will be to foster greater tolerance and inter-communal understanding in wider Indian society, particularly given the growing challenge of Islamophobia in recent decades. We believe this goal to be in strong alignment with one of the main aims of the Islamic Studies Centre at Cambridge,which also strives for greater inter-communal understanding in the UK beyond the confines of academia.

Dr Anna Corrigan (Centre of Latin American Studies and MMLL, University of Cambridge) and Dr Alejandro Martínez Rodríguez (Facultad de Comunicación y Letras, Universidad Diego Portales)

Censorship and restrictions imposed by authoritarian regimes across Latin America and Eastern Europe
during the final decades of the Cold War severely limited the circulation and exhibition of experimental,
critical, or political art within and between these regions. Nevertheless, as historians Cristina Freire, Klara Kemp-Welch, and Zanna Gilbert have observed, creative exchange, underground publication, and
collective collaboration were sustained through correspondence networks operating within the global
postal system. From Yugoslavia to Uruguay and from Chile to the GDR, the 1970s–1990s witnessed a
vibrant exchange of manifestos, visual poetry, and found-object collages among artists across these
countries and beyond.
My current research project, which will culminate in a second monograph, assesses the extent to which these tactile, ephemeral, and small-scale experimental projects articulate an alternative vision of the world—one that served as a counter-narrative to the global dichotomy of capitalism versus communism.
These networks reveal a unique interface between Latin America and Eastern Europe: an articulation of
the universal grounded in solidarity, creative exchange, and freedom of expression. The aim of this
research is to demonstrate how these alternative visions of the “universal,” emerging from acts of creative (postal) exchange, challenged polarized ideological and economic notions of selective global “unity”during the late Cold War period.

Dr Jing Liao (Foreign Languages and Literature-Fudan) and Prof Christine van Ruymbeke (FAMES-Cambridge)

As President Xi has noted, both Chinese and Arab civilizations possess unique and long-standing systems, yet they share common values that reflect humanity’s collective pursuit of progress—such as moderation, harmony, tolerance, and self-discipline. In an increasingly interconnected world, it is more important than ever to promote dialogue between civilizations, foster mutual respect and understanding, and identify meaningful connections between traditional cultural values and the challenges facing modern societies.
In this project, the proposed collaborative research with the University of Cambridge will be situated within the broader framework of China–Middle East studies, and is aligned with China’s
foreign policy objective of building a China-Arab community with a shared future. The focus will be on examining the historical mechanisms, contemporary relevance, and future potential of civilizational exchange between China and the Arab world. By analyzing both the continuities and changes in cross-cultural engagement, this research hopes to shed light on how traditional wisdom from both civilizations can contribute to modern diplomacy, social cohesion, and global peace.
During this short-term academic visit, I hope to engage in meaningful scholarly exchange with faculty at the University of Cambridge, particularly with researchers whose work intersects with the politics, history, and culture of the Middle East. The visit will also serve as an opportunity to discuss the feasibility of joint course development, particularly in areas such as Sino-Arab relations, Arab thought, and intercultural dialogue. This collaboration aims not only to advance academic knowledge but also to lay the foundation for sustained institutional partnership between Fudan University and the University of Cambridge, contributing to the broader mission of global humanistic exchange.

Prof Miranda Griffin (MMLL-Cambridge), Prof Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (ASNC-Cambridge), Prof Lian Lu (English-Fudan) Prof Chengzhou He (Dean of the School of Arts-Nanjing)

Our rationale for this reconnaissance visit to both the universities of Nanjing and Fudan is to learn from colleagues in our partner universities about the ways in which what we in the West call the Middle Ages is conceptualised, researched, and taught in China. This will involve discussions with those who teach and research other periods of the pre-modern era as well. At this critical stage in both projects, we will explore the practicalities of how teaching in the Global Middle Ages MPhil might be enhanced
through contacts with colleagues in our partner institutions, and establish contact with potential contributors to the edited volume. We plan to give two joint research talks at each institution; the first on the manuscript culture of the medieval Latin west, illustrated with reference to manuscripts in the Cambridge collections pertaining to our own specialist areas. The second will focus on ecocritical approaches to medieval literature.

In each institution, we will also offer a discussion forum involving graduate students; and an exploratory workshop with colleagues on potential intersections in teaching and research.

Dr Chang Chen (English-Nanjing) and Prof Jenny Mander (MMLL-Cambridge)

This project seeks to challenge Western-centric models of world literature research by examining Chinese rural literature’s layered narratives of migration, exploring urban-rural movement in human lives alongside symbolic connections to natural migratory phenomena, such as bird migration and river pathways. By studying these patterns, the project proposes that such entanglements of human and ecological migrations offer a transformative and relational approach to re- understanding the scope and connotation of world literature. This exploration intends to enrich the Global Humanities discourse by embracing an ecological and cross-cultural perspective on movement, identity, and transformation.

My collaboration with Professor Jenny Mander and Global Humanities Network offers a unique opportunity to explore global humanities through the intertwined lenses of migration, literature and world history. By integrating Chinese rural perspectives with Dr Mander’s expertise in migration, the movement of ideas, and the symbolic significance of gardens and plantations, our collaboration enriches the understanding of migration as both a physical and conceptual journey. Our collaboration will advance interdisciplinary research by juxtaposing Dr Mander’s focus on labor migration, tourism, and “stuckedness” with themes of urban-rural migration and ecological entanglements in Chinese literature. This comparative approach can yield valuable insights into the shared and contrasting ways in which different cultures conceptualize settlement, mobility, and rootedness, with plantations and other natural sceneries serving as symbolic touchstones across time and space. This collaboration will have lasting benefits for the Global Humanities Initiative, laying the groundwork for future exchanges between our institutions. Through academic lectures and communications, shared academic resources, and potential collaborative publications, we will create a dynamic network that
encourages ongoing dialogues on migration, world literature and art, and the flow of cultural and natural knowledge.

Dr Sura Qadiri (MMLL-Cambridge), Prof Charles Forsdick (MMLL-Cambridge) and Dr Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (English-AUB)

The English Department at AUB is home to experts in a variety of world literatures, including francophone and Arabic language literatures. Though the focus is on French in our Cambridge department, research and teaching interests span a global range of literatures and critical and theoretical approaches. Increasingly in our research and teaching, which focuses on francophone literatures form North Africa and the Middle East, we seek to signal the multilingual vibrancy of these spaces, attempting to model a wider linguistic perspective that can be taken by non-specialists of Arabic language literature. The aim is to give as broad a view as possible of the literary landscape of the region.

Our collaborator, Dr Sonja MejcherAtassi takes a similar approach, though from the perspective of a specialist in Arabic literatures. Dr Mejcher-Atassi has invited us to lead an online session on francophone literature next Spring as part of her Capstone postgraduate teaching series. She will in turn be visiting Cambridge in March 2025 for a book launch at AMES, and this will give us an opportunity to plan an exchange. The exchange will enable us to make a two-week visit to AUB. We will offer presentations based on our current research and take part in workshops for postgraduate students on francophone literature from North Africa and the Caribbean.

Sura’s talk will be based on her forthcoming book, Postsecular Poetics: Reading Religion in French and Francophone Literature and will be on ‘Building Diverse Community Through Literature.’ Professor Forsdick will present on disciplinary trends in the UK, opening up an opportunity for discussion on the shape and value of literary studies and the humanities more broadly in our respective institutions. The activity complements developments in the area of Francophone postcolonial studies associated with the Global Humanities Initiative and funded by an award from the professorial support fund made to Professor Forsdick and Dr Doyle Calhoun.

Wolfhart Totschnig (Philosophy at Universidad Diego Portales) and Stephen Cave ( Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge)

My recent research and teaching have been concerned with the debate about the possible
advent of human-equivalent artificial intelligence. Specifically, I have aimed to highlight and
analyse the political problems that this event might provoke. Thus, my work stands in opposition
to the predominant attitude in the debate, which is to see the issue not as a political, but as a
technological problem, a problem of how to keep artificial intelligence under control. Against this
approach, my research starts from the assumption that a human-equivalent artificial intelligence,
if it should come into existence, will probably be an autonomous agent in the sense that it will
determine by itself what its goal or principle of action will be. It will then not be controllable like a
machine, but a political actor that needs to be engaged.

Given the affinity between my research and the work of the Leverhulme Centre, my visit would
be, as Stephen Cave notes in his letter, “an excellent opportunity to explore long term teaching
and research collaborations” between the Centre and my department, the Institute of Philosophy
of Universidad Diego Portales. Apart from the theoretical cross-fertilization to be expected (which
I described in the previous section), I will be able to share during my visit my expertise on how
the issues of AI governance and regulation are being discussed and implemented in South
America. As a member of a commission of the Senate of the Republic of Chile tasked with
developing a proposal toward an AI strategy for Chile (2019–2020), I gained detailed insight into
these practical aspects of AI research. This insight, regarding the current debates and initiatives
in another part of the world, may be of particular interest to the members of the Leverhulme
Centre and the AI:FAR programme.

Lanlan Du (Institute of Global Humanities, Nanjing University) and Joanna Page (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)

Literature in other forms of media such as drama, film, television and digital media has made “the literary” a heterogeneous field. Climate change fiction, evolving from a subgenre of science fiction into a class of its own, portrays humans’ intricate relationship with the planet and deals with the ethical questions about humankind’s responsibility in the unprecedented crisis caused by the anthropogenic activities. Interestingly, the climate change narrative has also exploded on screen. Films and TV series either adapt some climate change fiction or represent directly the phenomena related to global warming, and large-scale climatic changes. For instance, In addition to some well-known filmic examples such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy was adapted into Hulu TV series, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Elven was adapted into HBO TV series, and Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road was adapted into a film in 2009, etc. Drawing on critical post humanist and new materialist thoughts, this project attempts to explore the cultural phenomenon of intermediality, emphasizing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actants, and pondering on the issue of intermedial performativity, i.e. the transformative power of the intertwined relationships among individuals, artefacts, and hybrid cultural forms to highlight the importance of art and humanities in keeping people to live on.  

At University of Cambridge, the researcher plans to gather both the language-based and the visual materials to make a thorough study on the project. Then the researcher will attend seminars, lectures and other academic activities at CRASSH, and give a project talk as well, trying to build a wide network with colleagues there. Besides, the researcher also plans to visit the university of Liverpool, which has a well-established science fiction studies program, to have a better understanding between art and technology. 

Felipe Hernandez (Architecture at University of Cambridge) and Elizabeth Wagemann (Architecture at UDP)

This project explores Indigenous knowledge in order to address a number of important issues in
architecture and urban studies throughout the Americas. Chilean architects, planners and
legislators are at the forefront of this emergent field, advancing the notion of ‘Culturally Specific
Housing’ (CSH). In short, CSH enables Indigenous groups to purchase, design, and build social
housing schemes which meet their specific needs. Previously, Indigenous peoples received
housing benefits through regular social housing programmes for low-income urban dwellers. As
such, the type of housing they received did not satisfied their requirements and often instigated
clashes with other cultural groups allocated to the same neighbourhood. Although only a handful of projects have been completed so far, studying them is fundamental in order to refine
the procedures and, more importantly, to investigate the possibilities to implement similar
programmes/policies in other countries with similar housing challenges for Indigenous groups.
Objectives
The project will focus on three key issues, and each represents a very clear objective to facilitate
the refinement of current practices and their implementation in other countries throughout the
Americas.

1) To study the policies that have enabled Indigenous communities to generate their
own housing projects.

2) To examine processes of participatory design and collective construction in various cases throughout Chile.

3) Finally, to investigate the implementation of ancestral knowledges in the treatment of both nature and landscape, which could serve to mitigate environmental damage in large cities like Santiago, and others in the Americas.

Alexander Bird (Philosophy, University f Cambridge) and Dr Jie Yin (Philosophy, Fudan University)

We will co-teach a course in the philosophy of medicine to philosophy students and to medical students. In a previous part of my career, I was the Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at King’s College London, where colleagues and I developed a world-leading programme of philosophy for medical students, as well as a course for philosophy students at UG to PG levels. My collaborator, Dr Jie Yin, is developing a similar programme at Fudan, and we believe that my experience will be of help in this.

Our plan, therefore, is to deliver the core of a philosophy of medicine course as two-week intensive course, with four sessions each week. This course will be based on the courses I have taught previously.

We will adapt this teaching to the Chinese context. Doing so will be instructive to both parties, as we learn about the cultural contexts of medicine in China and in the UK, and how they differ (or not). (For example, modern Chinese medicine inherits a large component of traditional Chinese medicine, for example, and it will be interesting to see how his affects the teaching of medicine and of the philosophy of medicine.) Dr Yin visited Cambridge in April/May 2023 when we began to discuss the outlines of our syllabus. We will pick up where we left off to develop an innovative philosophy of medicine programme for the Chinese context. In so doing we will consider how Chinese philosophy can play a part in our programme.

Rebecca Anne Barr (English, School of Art & Humanities, University of Cambridge) and David Currell (English, American University of Beirut)

This project between English Faculty at the American University of Beirut and the University of Cambridge seeks to examine the roles and forms of satire in a global context. It aims to analyse satire as ‘world literature’: that is, as writing which ‘circulates beyond the country of origin, whether in translation or in [its] original language’ (David Damrosch, World Literature, 4) and which circulates internationally, changing and acquiring meanings beyond those found in its initial cultural and historical context. By bringing together literary specialists on satire, as well as comparatists working in both institutions, this project aims to examine the transformations of satirical texts across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. The plan of activities proposed for this iteration of the scheme are envisaged as setting the foundations for a longer-term knowledge exchange between the two universities. This will kick start the collaboration by establishing collaborative affinities and exploring points of overlap and contact between Prof Currell’s research on seventeenth-century satire and her own work on humour. As part of the visit, she will give a research seminar on William Hogarth’s afterlives in contemporary digital satire. This talk will develop ideas set forth at a conference on Hogarth’s role in the Humanities and will consider the international resonance that eighteenth-century satire has in the current geopolitical turmoil. This will set the framework for further examinations of satire in global contexts: the deterritoralized space of the internet providing an arena for the exchange and metamorphosis of satirical texts and images.

Jenny Mander (French, Faculty of MMLL at University of Cambridge) and Chengzhou He (English, Drama and Comparative Literature, Nanjing University)

The European Enlightenment is widely considered as a formative period in the history of Western civilization and is invoked as positive or negative reference point either side of the rhetorical border that divides ‘East’ from ‘West’.  In recent decades, the intellectual and societal transformations during this period have been examined increasingly in global context.  Postcolonial literary criticism has, however, foregrounded transatlantic colonial dynamics and their legacies at the expense of eighteenth-century European/Asian entanglements.  The economic focus of the Re Orient movement, on the other hand, has neglected cultural exchange and the impact of literary texts on East-West global relations during this period.

This project will consider these relations through the lens of the literary, including historical, philosophical, political, and emerging anthropological discourses, as well as narrative fiction and theatre.  The emphasis will be less on ‘Orientalism’ (or ‘Occidentalism’) and more on the ‘diplomatic’ and ‘hospitable’ functions of literature, exploring the type of work literature does, including through translation, in various social and cultural contexts, in adapting the local to the landscape of the global.  By retracing East-West connections that are inscribed within literary discourse and their impact on contemporary readers/audiences, the aim is to reflect collaboratively upon cultural hospitality in eighteenth-century Europe and Asia, and its contribution to debates about the nature of universal humanity and the legitimacy of enlightened ideas of progress.

Weiyi Wu (School of Arts, Nanjing University) and Joanna Page (The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge)

Although many scholars have elaborated on historical and aesthetic significances of the Hudson River School, it has been treated as a homogeneous and static object in these studies. Focusing on Thomas Cole and his pupil Fredric Church, this project aims to examine variations of the “Hudson River Landscape” through analysing the cross-fertilization between the emerging American school of landscape painting and Romantic Poetry, artistic photography from the perspective of comparative arts. The paradoxical role of photography is carefully investigated in order to reveal how nature is constructed as an aesthetic ideal through mediation and remediation by geologists, travellers and artists. The relationship between art and technology is thus a central theme of this project, which takes its discussion to a more nuanced layer – the sense of darkness inherent in aesthetic Modernism, thus manifesting the relevance of this project to current theoretic debates on environmental aesthetics, post humanism and Anthropocene.

Faik Kurtulmus (Political Science and International Relations, Sabanci University) and Stephen John (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)

If science based policies are going to be democratically legitimate and effective, the public has to trust science. Moreover, this trust needs to be well-placed: citizens should trust scientists worthy of their trust and in light of good reasons. However, citizens’ opportunity to enjoy well-placed public trust in science is not equal. This project will examine two sources of inequality and explore what justice requires in response to them.

The first source of inequality arises out of the inevitable role of values in science. In our inquiries about the world, there is always the risk of error. Given our limited resources, we must decide which errors we’ll prioritize avoiding. This choice reflects value judgments. For instance, research about the effects of different policies in response to a pandemic involve choices about the badness of under or over estimating different risks. How such choices are made impacts citizens’ opportunity to enjoy well-placed trust in science: If scientists are likely to have not factored in a social group’s interests into their value judgments, then it makes sense for members of this group to be less trusting of the scientific advice they give.

The second issue arises because different social groups have different relationships with science. Some groups, such as African Americans in the United States, have historically been subject to unethical treatment by the medical establishment. In such cases, it is more difficult for members of these groups to trust scientists compared to more advantaged groups. They need to be offered more evidence to enjoy well-placed trust in science.

Both inequalities of the opportunity to enjoy well-placed trust in science raise complex questions of justice. The project will be an opportunity for the host and the applicant, who have both contributed to the philosophical literature on public trust in science, to explore the complex interaction between public trust in science and the requirements of justice.

Ovidiu Stanciu (Institute of Philosophy, Diego Portales University) and Emma Gilby (French, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge)

Alexandre Kojève is above all known for his seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered between 1933 and 1939 at the EPHE in Paris, which contributed decisively to the introduction of Hegelian thought into French culture. This research intends to conduct focuses on the relation between Kojève’s philosophical project and literature. Drawing on his published works and on manuscripts available in the Fonds Alexandre Kojève of the French National Library, we will first explore that way in which authors such as Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau have taken up and worked out in their own literary projects the impulses provided by Kojève’s work. Secondly, we will examine the transforming retroeffect Kojève’s reading of his former students’ literary productions had on his own thought. In particular, we will contend that it is while addressing the challenges raised by the works of Bataille, Queneau (but also Françoise Sagan), that Kojève developed a general theory of literature, absent in his previous works. In this context, literature is to be understood as a particular strategy of sense-making, capable of tearing open the already established frameworks of meaning, interrupting the normative structures in place in order to make room for a surplus of meaning, otherwise inaccessible.

Dr Peiqin Zhou (Sociology – Nanjing) and Prof Jenny Mander (MMLL – Cambridge)

In the past two years, I have been conducting research on homosexuality, and are working on two projects: first, I spent nearly one year (September 2020 to July 2021) shooting a documentary about an LGBT choir in Nanjing. This project was conducted by me and several Nanjing University undergraduates. Now we have finished shooting and is editing the documentary, which will be about 40 minutes long. My second project is to investigate “coming out of the closet” in Nanjing, and has chosen to focus on the parents of homosexuals, because parents are often the most difficult objects for homosexuals’ coming out. I am working on this research through participatory observation and interviews. I look forward to continuing this research through my academic visit to Cambridge University, including exchanging ideas with faculty members and students in related fields, conducting more literature review and start academic writing for this project. I believe this visit will be particularly helpful for homosexual research, which is relatively new in mainland China, with limited data and limited opportunities for academic dialogue. 

Planned activities during the visiting period include but not limited to:  

1. Screening the documentaryon a LGBT choir in Nanjingproduced by myself and a few NJU students from Oct. 2020 to June 2022  
2. Delivering an academic talk. The talk isfocused my ongoing research on Chinese parents’ response to their homosexual children’s coming out.  
3. Visiting classesrelated to gender studies, China studies or media culture studies. I have experience of independent and cooperative teaching in universities in the United States, France and Germany, which I consider productive and inspiring to all participants.  
4. Other activities as my hosting professor sees fit.

Kranti Saran (Philosophy, Ashoka University, India) and Shruti Kapila (History Faculty, Cambridge) 

Our project encompasses intellectual collaboration and exchange on one of the most cutting-edge innovations in the humanities: the globalisation of political thought. Modern scholarship is awakening to the intellectual depth of figures and texts from the global South and their potential for radically reconfiguring modern scholarship. We will design a short course that will teach novel methods to generate productive readings of neglected texts that will help direct and shape future scholarship and conversation. 

Our course will be an introductory immersion in selected texts, methods, and key concepts that are reconfiguring political thought today. We will reflect on Indian texts and concepts—excerpts from the Mahabharata epic for instance – and put them in dialogue with western analogues such as excerpts from Thomas Hobbes’s works. However, our method is not comparative. We aim instead at foundational and comprehensive readings that take the intellectual world from which these concepts emerged seriously. We create these readings by integrating diverse approaches such as contextualism, analytic philosophy, and historical methods. Through covering four central themes—the self and its powers, the good ruler, war, and peace—students will be equipped to reconceptualise foundational questions of politics, ethics, and human life. For example, a reading of the nun Sulabhā’s refutation of King Janaka (Mahabharata 12.308) shows how a particular conception of the self and its powers, radically distinct from modern conceptions, produces a discourse sensitive to gender disparities that holds power to account. At the same time, it offers critical perspectives on the social and sexual contract as theorised in the West. 

The main activity will be a jointly taught weekly seminar spread over a month for graduate students. 

 Martin Crowley (/French, Cambridge University), Subha Mukherji (English, Cambridge University), Jonathan Gil Harris (English, Ashoka University) and Sumana Roy (Creative Writing, Ashoka University)

This new collaboration grows organically from the overlap between the participants’ research (Mukherji’s on migrant forms and migrant knowledge; Harris’s on the migrancy of personal objects; Roy’s on colonial botany; Crowley’s on migration understood through distributed agency). It creates the concept of ‘Migrant ecologies’ as a tool for students and researchers to analyse the generation of meaning and forms within processes of displacement, and as a basis for ongoing research collaboration between the participants. It focusses on forms of migrancy – human, non-human and aesthetic – as tracing fault-lines where the geophysical, the political, and the imaginary meet. Mapping these, it tracks key encounters where worlds are unmade and re-made: between cultures and mobile populations, the global and the planetary, migrant bodies and formal institutions of power, and human and non-human participants in enforced movement. 

The project proposes a co-taught graduate module, initially to run for one term/semester. It will examine literary, historical-archival and filmic materials to address topics including: migrant forms (imaginative works responding to the ethical demands of mass dislocation) and moving things (contingent material remnants accompanying displacement); strange encounters and forms of improvised coexistence (between people, and between human beings and materials). Featured sites will include the Black Atlantic, the Francophone Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, the Silk Roads, the Mediterranean, and postcolonial Europe. Chronological encounters will contrast and connect the early modern and the contemporary as framing and as organized by histories of migration. 

During the visit, the team will hold eight meetings to design the co-teaching in detail; present teaching plans for graduate student feedback; conduct two research workshops; identify external funding sources and planning future collaborations in a research network, an international colloquium, and co-authored publications.

Jie Yin (Philosophy, Fudan University) and Alexander Bird (Philosophy, Cambridge University)

Our project will initiate collaboration in teaching and research at the intersection of philosophy and medicine. Fudan University has a long-term goal of promoting medical humanities, with Philosophy of Medicine now recognized as a core subject. The project brings together two experts: Jie Yin, whose textbook on the subject was published in 2020 (《医学哲学》/Philosophy of Medicine, 复旦大学出版社/ Fudan University Press) and has been adopted for courses at several universities in China; and Prof. Alexander Bird, a renowned scholar fundamental in the field of philosophy of science and medicine. Our aim is to co-design a philosophy of medicine course for graduate students at Fudan. It is hoped too that the course will be the beginning of future collaborations between both institutions. 

Junlei Yang (Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University) and Hans Van de Ven (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)

Chinese war films function at different levels and integrate different themes, one of which is the development of the Chinese Communist Party during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945) and its changing leadership role during this war. This project focuses on a series of early war films of the 1950s, which predate the wave of war films that burst unto the scenes in the 1990s and beyond. If these focused on the national character of China’s resistance, the 1950s war films focused on the role of Chinese Communist Party, the nature of the Japanese invasion, and the contribution to the war of various groups in society. 

The objective is to explore and analyze the “Red China” imagery of 1950s war films by discussing questions such as: “How did these films depict the Party’s history in transnational war scenes” and “How did they impact public memory of China’s war with Japan”. Exploring these topics will help us deepen our understanding of the production of war films at the time, the political contexts in which they operated, and the similarities and differences with war films produced elsewhere in the world. Our study will explore the linkages between the Second World War and the formation of national consciousness in East Asian history. 

Li Shuangzhi (German Department, Institute for Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University) and Sarah Colvin (German, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages, Cambridge University)

This project will focus on narratives of global interconnections in the German-language novels of W. G. Sebald, Ilija Trojanow, Stephan Thome and Christoph Ransmayr. Their various representations of Asian-European encounters combine historical experiences of cultural otherness and current concerns about the ongoing globalization process. The aim is to explore critical moments in the creative rewriting of global history and to understand the particular world-, self- and other-images developed by German-speaking authors in the present. 

The contemporary novel contributes to the (re-)production of global visions in a special way and draws attention in the recent literature. Academics note that authors all over the world are writing significant texts that show the global network of relationships, knowledge, signs and images of different cultures, shaped by the changing structure of powers. Their fictive stories elaborately display the colonial desire, the anxiety of identities as well as the constant construction of centres and margins in global dimensions. The latest winner of Nobel Prize for Literature 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah, is a prominent example. 

In German literature from the late twentieth century until now, there is also a wide range of novels that deal with globalization and its consequences. One factor in this is the rise of a reunited Germany as a global player. Another is the increasing ethnic diversity of German-speaking countries. It is important therefore to examine the writings of German-speaking authors as literary reflections of global experiences. 

Through our collaboration, contemporary German-language novels will be closely read and analyzed, with special attention given to issues such as the colonial past of globalization, global injustice and the confrontation of Asia and Europe.

Xiaoquan Chu (French Department, Institute for Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University) and Martin Crowley (MMLL/French, Cambridge University),

This project aims to explore the conditions under which ideas and concepts move from one social and cultural environment to another with impacts that are only explicable in a larger historical context. We will focus on a particular case constituted by the worldwide propagation of a set of philosophical innovations known collectively as French theory. Since the end of the Second World War, French, or more precisely the Parisian intellectual circle, has been driven by an urge to revolutionize analytical tools for the study of literature, history, politics, society and the human creation in its most varied forms. While all those familiar conceptual labels – existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, de-constructionism etc. – might not do justice to the rich variety of the individual approaches by these versatile thinkers, they can serve as convenient indications for a general understanding of these theories and of the inner logic of their developments. Moreover, these different French theories came to be known in other countries and in other languages generally under these labels. In the second half of the twentieth century, French theory was enthusiastically received, notably in North America and mostly in departments of literary studies. 

While theoretical developments in post-war France manifestly followed a philosophical lineage initiated in Germany, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger, French theory was at the same time also elaborated as a reaction to social and intellectual challenges faced by French society after the War. In America, these theories were. however, understood and interpreted in a quite different context, and many proponents of French theory in the US are generally motivated by a social and political agenda distinctly different from that of their French counterparts. 

When the works of these eminent French intellectuals were introduced to China from the 1980s onwards, they were called upon to play yet another role in the transformation of the Chinese intellectual world and society in general. This process provides us with fascinating material for the study of the life of ideas and concepts during times of social and historical change. It is hoped that our project will lead to academic talks, seminars and joint teaching and publications.

Elizabeth Wagemann (Architecture, Universidad Diego Portales) and Michael H. Ramage (Architecture, Cambridge University)

This collaborative project seeks a joint reflection on the future of cities based on the impact of technologies on the built environment. The way cities have developed at different times in history has been impacted by advances in construction technology. For example, the development of tall buildings in the mid-nineteenth century was a consequence of the development of steel, reinforced concrete, and the invention of the elevator, changing the density of cities and the urban life. New technological developments, such as large-scale 3D printing machines, artificial intelligence, drones, and virtual prototyping, as well as the need to use more sustainable and innovative materials, will have an impact on the design of cities of the future, and therefore, the way we inhabit them. The objective of this collaboration will be to question the impact of technology and construction advancements in urban life, and to reflect on possible visions of the future of cities. This topic is of interest of both departments of architecture, the City and Territory LAB (U. Diego Portales), Materials and prototypes LAB (U. Diego Portales), and the Center for Natural Material Innovation (U. Cambridge).