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The long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last 500 years of Chinese history have been no less geographical than social or political. From the challenges to local-empire relations generated by substantial spatial mobility since the late Ming, to the imperial state’s persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing, to the disputes over the identity of the former “outer zones” in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of “all-under-heaven” to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the 20th century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived to include cartography, ethnography, historical geography, and cosmography, promises to provide an alternative approach to understanding the geographical entity we call “China” today.
A one-day conference on the place of geography in the history of early modern and modern China, co-sponsored by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the AAS China and Inner Asia Council, will be held in Little Rock, AR on Saturday, February 19, 2011. The purpose of the conference is to provide an opportunity for scholars of like interest to exchange and sharpen their ideas, and to facilitate further scholarly explorations along this direction. Laura Hostetler, author of Qing Colonial Enterprise, will deliver the keynote address.
We welcome scholars of all ranks to present their work at the conference. Please send individual paper abstracts or panel proposals (including abstracts of all papers) to both of the co-organizers. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and sent electronically by Oct. 30, 2010. A special journal issue or edited volume featuring some of the developed papers is planned following the event.
Contact info:
Yongtao Du, History Department, Oklahoma State University (yongtao.du@okstate.edu)
Jeff Kyong-McClain, History Department, University of Arkansas at Little Rock (jwkyongmccl@ualr.edu)
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