Call for Papers

With a strong focus on the cultural interactions and exchanges between imperial powers and East Asian societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we welcome different disciplinary approaches that explore both formal and informal manifestations of empire, the legacy and afterlives of the Japanese and Euro-American presence in East Asia, as well as the different ways in which empire was reconstituted and colonial relationships reconfigured in the early post-war decolonization period.

We are particularly interested in papers that address the multiple forms of cooperation and competition that existed between different imperial and national visions in colonial East Asia, as well as the imbrications or comparisons between the Japanese and Euro-Americans powers themselves. However, proposals that examine only one of these nations in China, Korea or Japan will also be considered. Papers can explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

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• Competing visions of different imperial projects

• Foreign education, curricula, and international schooling

• Clubs, sport associations, and other social/ cultural institutions

• Expatriate communities, popular culture, and associational life 

•  Trade networks, commercial links, and the business world

• Foreign literary culture: popular reading, travel writing, theatre and drama

• Colonial print, visual and material culture: exhibitions, fairs, museums, and libraries

• Missionary life, religious activity, and spiritual culture

• International broadcasting, mass media, and the foreign-language press

• Cultures of intellectual "improvement" and exclusion based on race, class, or gender

• Influence of women, working class expatriates, indigenous, and minority groups

• Public health, western medicine, and the colonial environment

• Legal and administrative cultures

• Colonial and imperial identities, expressions of national and transnational belongings

• Science, technology, and the pursuit of colonial knowledge 

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Please submit paper title, abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography to conference email address: eastasiaconferencehk2019@gmail.com. If you are submitting a proposal for a panel, please include an abstract for each paper (300 words), a summary of the panel theme (250 words), as well as a short biography of each panel speaker. All proposals should include your name, email address, and academic affiliation (if applicable) 

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Deadline for submission: EXTENDED 15 February 2019