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Culture and Historical Change |
Hoyt Tillman continues externally funded projects exploring cultural and historical changes in China; moreover, these grants include international research collaboration, especially with scholars from China and Germany. The most recent grant is from the American Council of Learned Societies to host a planning meeting at Arizona State University to discuss the transition from Tang (618-905) to Song (960-1279), which some scholars regard as comparable to the shift from medieval to early modern in European history. The planning meeting in April 2006 will make plans and select American and European China scholars to participate in the project's culminating conference to be held at Academia Sinica in September 2007. Leaders of this research project in Beijing and Taipei, Professors Deng Xiaonan and Huang K'uan-ch'ung, will participate in the Arizona State University planning meeting, along with Professors Peter Bol (Harvard), Charles Hartman (SUNY, Albany), and Paul Smith (Haverford). These three senior China specialists from the northeast will present papers at a panel on April 14 th on New Research on Medieval China. This panel is open to the public and is co-sponsored by Professor Claudia Brown, Director of the Center for Asian Studies, and Professor Robert Bjork, Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This panel will also have participants from Professor Stephen H. West's Workshop on Representation of Violence in Chinese Literature. These two related meetings are also supported by the President's Office at Arizona State University. Professor Deng will also be at Arizona State University for the whole month as part of Arizona State University's research exchange with Beida (Peking University in Beijing). Tillman has been collaborating with Beida historians since 1981 and helped establish Arizona State University's first exchange with China's premier university during his latest research stay at Beida from September 2003 through December 2004. He is also currently an official research associate of Beida's Center for Studies of Ancient Chinese History. In 2004, the Ministry of Education judged this Center to be "excellent," a designation awarded to less than twenty percent of its funded research centers in all fields of scientific and scholarly research. Tillman's research at the Beida Center was funded for ten months by a CIES Senior Fulbright Award and then for six months by a research grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. He extended his research in the period from Zhu Xi's (also spelled Chu Hsi) death in 1200 through the compilation of the official Song history by the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the 1340s in order to complete his narrative of the transformation of Daoxue (Learning of the Way) Confucianism from a fellowship among dissident intellectuals into the state orthodoxy of late imperial China. As such, he is writing a sequel to Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy (Hawaii, 1992) and its revised and expanded Chinese version, Zhu Xi de siwei shijie (Taipei, 1996 and Xi'an, 2002). While in Beijing, he also completed a three-year project funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation that was administered through Arizona State University. The funds supported research exploring cultural confrontations among various ethnic groups and states in China from 900 to 1300. He was on the editorial committee for the culminating conference volume that will be published in Shanghai in March of 2006. The volume also contains an essay by Dr. Christian Soffel, who held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for two years to work with Tillman at Arizona State University. Dr. Soffel's postdoctoral study was part of Tillman's Arizona State University-Humboldt Foundation Initiative to build upon his research contacts in Germany that were enhanced when he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in 2000. His was the first senior Humboldt Prize awarded for research contributions in Sinology (Chinese Studies). He spent a year in Germany collaborating primarily with Professor Dr. Hans van Ess and Professor Dr. Thomas Hoellmann of the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universaet in Munich. Professor van Ess has already made a follow-up visit to Arizona State University in 2003, and Professor Hoellmann is scheduled to come in the spring of 2006. Dr. Soffel became an assistant professor at LMU after the completion of his postdoctoral studies at Arizona State University. In the fall of 2005, the Humboldt Foundation funded Soffel's return visit to Arizona State University for a week to discuss the book that he and Tillman are writing on cultural developments in thirteenth-century China. All this research collaboration is part of Tillman's goal to establish a strong triangular research relationship between Arizona State University, LMU/Humboldt, and Beida. Although that triangular relationship has thus far been largely centered on Tillman's own research grants and projects with the China scholars at these two research universities, he hopes that the relationships will expand to involve other Arizona State University researchers and departments. |
Principal Investigator |
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Dr. Hoyt Tillman, |
Contact Information |
Hoyt Tillman |
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