HKIHSS

News

Application for Admission to Postgraduate Programmes 2012-13

MPhil and PhD Studies at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The main round of applications for research degrees will be invited in September 1, 2011 and the closing date will be December 1, 2011. Clearing round applications may be invited after the main round if there are study places left, and the closing dates for these rounds will be April 30, 2012 and August 31, 2012 respectively. Applicants are therefore advised to apply early.

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The Hang Seng Bank Golden Jubilee Education Fund for Research (2011-2012 Exercise)

All research staff and Fellows of the HKIHSS (inc. CAS) are now invited to submit applications for funding support from the Hang Seng Bank Golden Jubilee Fund for Research (2011-12 Exercise). Please submit your application form to Ms. Joan Cheng (joancheng@hku.hk) by Wednesday, 29 February 2012.

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Hang Seng Bank Golden Jubileen Education Fund for Research regulations_20120131 (PDF format)

Hang Seng Bank Fund Form_20120203 (Word file)

International Conference on

The Making of Asia: Health and Gender

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Date

March 9-10, 2012

Venue

Council Chamber, 8/F., Meng Wah Complex

The University of Hong Kong

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A Public Lecture

Modern Agendas Through Ancient Texts:

Ecology and Environment in Early China

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Professor Roel Sterckx

Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science and Civilization

University of Cambridge

Date

February 17, 2012

Time

4:30 p.m.

Venue

Senate Room, 10/F., Knowles Building

The University of Hong Kong

Roel Sterckx is Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare College, and currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taipei. He has published widely on the ways in which knowledge about the natural world was organized in traditional China. Other research interests include the interplay between moral and material values such as the religious economy, gift culture, and ideas about wealth and poverty. He is currently at work on a book re-examining agricultural thought in early China. Among his published and edited work are The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China (New York: MacMillan, 2005) and Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Abstract

The last few years have seen a wave of studies emerge in China and beyond that focus on its environmental history, climate change, the use of natural resources and sustainable development. Not infrequently China’s ancient philosophers and their views of nature are invoked as the ideological backdrop for the idea that Chinese civilization, at all times and in all places, was marked by the so-called “Unity of Heaven and Man” (tian ren he yi 天人合一). This lecture will question some of the assumptions behind the harmony between humans and their natural environment in China’s past. More specifically it will illustrate the sorts of problems historians are faced with when trying to make sense out of descriptions of natural events in ancient texts or match scientific data to historical sources.

First-come First Served; No registration required.

HKIHSS Newsletter (Fall 2011)