“差异与当下历史写作”国际学术研讨会

History, as a discipline, obviously emphasizes the difference between past and present, but our sense of difference is not limited to that. Since antiquity, historians have also drawn lines among geographical communities, ethnic groups, and political entities. Modern historians tend to lay stress on differences between historical periods, nation-states, regions, classes, environments, races, genders, beliefs, and so on, paying relatively little attention to the similarities and commonalities that unite people over space and time.  But there is another kind of difference that this conference will address：  historians often differ greatly in how they think and write about the past.  Over the past century, a succession of rebels in the field have introduced new themes, theories, methods, and paradigms. As a result, today’s historians have various options in our writing kit：  textual criticism, for example, or innovative narrative strategies, quantification and data display, a large palette of theories about change over time, and conflicting models of how we might measure that change. How one chooses among and combines these various options is worth deeper consideration. This conference tries to encourage us to explore a wide variety of “Histories” and to stimulate new thematic as well as multi-disciplinary dialogues among scholars, whatever their periods, regions, religions, material artifacts, ecologies, social groups, or cultural perspectives.  We seek to promote more reflective thinking about the many differences that divide historians and to ask how and whether those differences should be bridged.