Veranstaltungen

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

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Dear users,

On June 23rd at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the sixth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will be led by Dr. Rafal Felbur (Heidelberg University), titled “Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations.” In this talk, Dr. Felbur will introduce a project aimed at creating a born-digital historical research dictionary of the language used in the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist texts. The abstract is as follows:

Over the course of first millennium, thousands of Buddhist texts were translated from Indic languages into Chinese. Through this process, Chinese intellectual and religious life encountered entirely new worlds of thought and practice. In scale and significance, this translation movement constituted the largest transfer of culture between two major civilisations in the premodern world.

The earliest phase of this enterprise (148–401 CE), spanning roughly 250 years, was particularly dynamic, creative, and formative. Comparable in many respects to the development of Christianity in the Roman Empire before Constantine, this period witnessed the production of hundreds of translated works amounting to approximately four million Chinese characters—equivalent to some 20,000 pages in modern English translation.

This presentation introduces a project (currently in the planning stage) to create the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art online historical research dictionary devoted to the distinctive idiom that emerged in the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist literature.

About the speaker:

Dr. Rafal Felbur is Akademischer Assistent to the Chair of Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University. He works on the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics of the encounter between India and China in the first millennium CE.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia Talks: Philipp Kohl 26.10.2026

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(See English below)

Am 26. Oktober 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) laden wir herzlich zu einem Onlinevortrag ein, in dem PD Dr. Philipp Kohl (LMU München) eine ebenso unerwartete wie aufschlussreiche Episode der Wissenschaftsgeschichte beleuchtet. In “Counter-Revolutionary Dinosaurs”: A Popular History of the Gobi Paleontological Expeditions under Socialism stellt Philipp Kohl vor, wie Dinosaurierfunde in der Wüste Gobi zwischen sowjetischer Ideologie, mongolischer Literatur und polnischem Forschungsehrgeiz zum Politikum wurden.

Der Vortrag bietet einen Überblick über die Geschichte der Wüste Gobi als Schauplatz paläontologischer Ausstellungen, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf Wissenschaftlern aus sozialistischen Ländern, insbesondere aus der Sowjetunion und Polen, liegt. Ausgangspunkt ist die Feststellung, dass diese Geschichte nicht als eine Geschichte wissenschaftlicher Expeditionen begann, sondern als literarische Geschichte. Nach Roy Chapman Andrews’ sensationeller Entdeckung der ersten Dinosauriereier im Jahr 1923 erlebte die sowjetische Kultur ihren ersten „Dinosaurier-Boom“, lange vor dem Start der ersten mongolischen paläontologischen Expedition der Akademie der Wissenschaften im Jahr 1946. Obwohl der Expeditionsleiter, Ivan Efremov, einer der produktivsten sowjetischen Science-Fiction-Autoren war, verfasste er keine fiktionalen Texte über die Gobi-Expeditionen. Sein Reisebericht „Straße der Winde“ aus dem Jahr 1956 ist eher trockene Lektüre. Das Moskauer Paläontologische Museum, dem nach dem Aufbau der mongolischen Dinosaurierskelette der Platz ausgegangen war, blieb zwischen 1954 und 1987 für die Öffentlichkeit geschlossen.

Um zu erklären, warum Dinosaurier unter Stalin nicht besonders beliebt waren, wird der Vortrag nicht nur die politischen Zwänge der Paläontologie zu Beginn des Kalten Krieges in der Mongolischen Volksrepublik beleuchten, einer umkämpften geopolitischen Zone zwischen der UdSSR und China. Er wird auch die (Nicht-)Rezeption der sowjetischen Expedition im ersten sozialistischen Roman der mongolischen Literatur, Chadraabalyn Lodoidambas „Im Altai“ (1951), erörtern. Außerdem werden die sowjetischen Forscher mit ihren polnischen Nachfolgern der 1960er Jahre unter Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska verglichen, deren Ergebnisse in Ausstellungen, Filmen und einem Dinosaurierpark einer breiten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht wurden.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem Mastodon-Account und BlueSky an.

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On 26 October 2026 from 6 pm (Berlin time), we cordially invite you to an online lecture in which PD Dr Philipp Kohl (LMU Munich) will shed light on an episode in the history of science that is as unexpected as it is revealing. In “Counter-Revolutionary Dinosaurs”: A Popular History of the Gobi Paleontological Expeditions under Socialism, Dr Kohl will explain how dinosaur discoveries in the Gobi Desert became a political issue caught between Soviet ideology, Mongolian literature and Polish research ambition.

The talk will offer a popular history of the Gobi desert as a site for paleotological exhibitions with a focus on scientists from socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union and Poland. It will depart from the observation that this story did not begin as one of scientific expeditions but as a literary history. After Roy Chapman Andrews’s sensational discovery of the first dinosaur eggs in 1923, Soviet culture experienced its first dinosaur rush, long before the launch of the first Mongolian Paleontological Expedition of the Academy of Science in 1946. Although the expedition leader, Ivan Efremov, was one of the most prolific Soviet writers of science fiction, he did not write any fictional accounts about the Gobi expeditions. His 1956 travelogue Road of Winds makes rather dry reading. And the Moscow Paleontological Museum, having run out of space after assembling the Mongolian dinosaur skeletons, stayed closed to the public between 1954 and 1987.

In order to explain why dinosaurs were not particularly popular under Stalin, the talk will not only look at the political constraints of paleontology at the onset of the Cold War in the Mongolian People’s Republic, a contested geopolitical zone between the USSR and China. It will also discuss the Soviet expedition’s (non-)reception in the first socialist novel of Mongolian literature, Chadraabalyn Lodoidamba’s In the Altai (1951). And it will compare the Soviet researchers to their 1960s Polish successors under Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, whose results were widely popularized in exhibitions, films, and a dinosaur park.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia Talks: Bolormaa Boldbaatar 28.01.2027

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(See English below)

Am 28. Januar 2027 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) spricht Bolormaa Blodbaatar (Universität Bonn) in ihrem Onlinevortrag “Imagery in the facade decoration of the Chinggis Khan Museum – the conveyed meaning” über die Bildsprache und symbolische Bedeutung der Fassadendekoration des Chinggis Khan Museums in Ulaanbaatar.

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Vortrags steht die Gebäudegestaltung des Dschingis-Khan-Museums in Ulaanbaatar, die größtenteils einzigartige Artefakte aus der archäologischen Geschichte der Mongolei darstellt. Die Gesamtgestaltung der 2022 fertiggestellten modernen Architektur zeigt eine Fülle antiker Kunstelemente, die vom Mongolischen Reich bis in die Bronzezeit zurückreichen. Die Bildsprache verschiedener früher Epochen bildet ein einheitliches Dekor und eine neue visuelle Darstellung an diesem Gebäude. Um die Bedeutung des dekorativen Konzepts zu verstehen, werden einzelne Motive und ihre Symbolik im historischen und kulturellen Kontext detailliert untersucht unter Zuhilfenahme des archäologischen Zusammenhangs. Die kompositorische Darstellung und die Interpretation der Gebäudegestaltung werden aus kunsthistorischer Perspektive analysiert, wobei ikonografische Aspekte berücksichtigt und die charakteristischen Merkmale hervorgehoben werden.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem Mastodon-Account und BlueSky an.

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On 28 January 2027, from 6 pm (Berlin time), Bolormaa Boldbaatar (University of Bonn) will give an online lecture entitled “Imagery in the façade decoration of the Chinggis Khan Museum – the conveyed meaning“, in which she will discuss the visual language and symbolic significance of the façade decoration at the Chinggis Khan Museum in Ulaanbaatar.

This lecture focuses on the building decoration of the Genghis Khan Museum in Ulaanbaatar, most of which depicts outstanding artifacts from Mongolia’s archaeological history. The overall ornamentation of the modern architecture, completed in 2022, displays a wealth of ancient art elements dating from the Mongol Empire to the Bronze Age. The imagery of different early eras forms a combined decor and a new visual representation on this building. In order to understand the meaning conveyed by the decorative concept, individual motifs and their symbolism are examined in detail in their historical and cultural context. In doing so, their archaeological connection is shown. The compositional representation and the interpretation of the building decoration are analyzed from an art-historical perspective, taking iconographic aspects into account and highlighting the characteristics.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed via Webex. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon and BlueSky.

CrossAsia Talks: Eric Schluessel 18.06.2026

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(See English below)

Wir freuen uns sehr, Dr. Eric Schluessel (University of Oxford) am 18.06.2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) zu seinem mittlerweile zweiten CrossAsia Talk mit dem Titel The Ürümchi Mutiny of 1864: Revisiting the Muslim Uprisings and State in North Xinjiang  zu begrüßen. Während sein erster CrossAsia Talk noch hybrid stattgefunden hat, wird dieser hier eine reine Onlineveranstaltung sein.

1864 erschütterten zahlreiche Gewaltausbrüche Xinjiang. Der Vortrag deutet diese Ereignisse nicht als geheimnisvollen „muslimischen Aufstand“, sondern als Meuterei – vergleichbar mit den Geschehnissen in Indien im Jahr 1857. Durch die erneute Auswertung von Quellen in chinesischer, tschagataischer, persischer, russischer, manjurischer und arabischer Sprache, von denen viele seit über 140 Jahren von der Forschung nicht mehr herangezogen wurden, beleuchtet Eric Schluessel die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Ursachen, die Soldaten der Grünen-Standard-Armee und ihre Familien zu gewaltsamem Protest bewegten.

In Xinjiang, Qing Central Asia, in 1864, dozens of incidents of intercommunal and anti-state violence broke out seemingly all at once. Scholars have typically referred to these events as the “Muslim uprising(s)” and attributed their origins to a vast and secret conspiracy against the empire. In fact, the leaders of these uprisings were almost all among the Qing’s most favoured and celebrated representatives in the region, including successful military leaders. This is especially the case of the violence in North Xinjiang, which we think of as being led by Sino-Muslims. This talk reexamines these events not as a mysterious “uprising,” but instead as a munity not unlike that which took place in India in 1857. By revisiting sources in Chinese, Chaghatay, Persian, Russian, Manchu, and Arabic—many of which have not been consulted by scholars in over 140 years—it establishes the social conditions that led members of the Qing’s Green Standard army and their families to engage in violent protest against changing economic policies. It retells the story of the North Xinjiang uprisings and the emergence of a Sino-Muslim-led state.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem Mastodon und BlueSky an.

—

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Eric Schluessel (University of Oxford) to his second CrossAsia Talk, “The Ürümchi Mutiny of 1864: Revisiting the Muslim Uprisings and the State in North Xinjiang,” on June 18, 2026, starting at 6:00 p.m. (Berlin time). While his first CrossAsia Talk was held in a hybrid format, this one will be an online-only event.

In Xinjiang, Qing Central Asia, in 1864, dozens of incidents of intercommunal and anti-state violence broke out seemingly all at once. Scholars have typically referred to these events as the “Muslim uprising(s)” and attributed their origins to a vast and secret conspiracy against the empire. In fact, the leaders of these uprisings were almost all among the Qing’s most favoured and celebrated representatives in the region, including successful military leaders. This is especially the case of the violence in North Xinjiang, which we think of as being led by Sino-Muslims. This talk reexamines these events not as a mysterious “uprising,” but instead as a munity not unlike that which took place in India in 1857. By revisiting sources in Chinese, Chaghatay, Persian, Russian, Manchu, and Arabic—many of which have not been consulted by scholars in over 140 years—it establishes the social conditions that led members of the Qing’s Green Standard army and their families to engage in violent protest against changing economic policies. It retells the story of the North Xinjiang uprisings and the emergence of a Sino-Muslim-led state.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
image source provided by Dr. What does it mean to be a historian in the age of AI? AI is not the first such shift. The digital turn quietly reshaped how historians work. It raised accessibility. A historian today starts a project at a search engine, pulls sources from a digital archive, and turns archive photographs into research data at home. As Ian Milligan puts it, “we are all digital now.” If the digital turn brought accessibility, AI brings something accessibility alone could not: machine reading at the scale of the archive itself. Why scale? Historical research moves through stages: reading, extracting, structuring, analyzing, visualizing, asking new questions. Each works on a single document but breaks at archive scale. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty hold roughly 384,000 articles across five centuries. Reconstructing the careers of even one generation of officials requires linking and reasoning across more material than a single researcher can manage. In this talk I draw on several ongoing projects, including a vision-language model fine-tuned for Manchu and an agent-based record-linkage system across the Annals and the Bangmok (civil-examination rosters), to argue that AI does not replace any step in this sequence; it changes the scale at which each becomes possible. The Manchu model does not read more carefully than a Manchu specialist, but it makes an entire archive legible. The linkage system does not match identities more carefully than a historian by hand, but it tracks the same person across sources that no individual could reconcile end to end. Once reading, linkage, and structuring scale up, questions of a different order become askable: not one official’s career, but a generation’s; not one local pattern, but the structure of bureaucratic mobility across five centuries. The historian’s craft is unchanged; what changes is what becomes askable. To be a historian in the age of AI is to treat discovery, when the data itself begins to suggest the questions, as a stage of the craft.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts

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Dear users,

On June 9th at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the fifth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will feature a presentation by Dr. Donghyeok Choi titled “From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts.” In this talk, Dr. Choi explores how the craft of historical research is changing in the age of AI through several of his ongoing digital humanities projects focused on premodern East Asian texts. The abstract is as follows:

What does it mean to be a historian in the age of AI? AI is not the first such shift. The digital turn quietly reshaped how historians work. It raised accessibility. A historian today starts a project at a search engine, pulls sources from a digital archive, and turns archive photographs into research data at home. As Ian Milligan puts it, “we are all digital now.” If the digital turn brought accessibility, AI brings something accessibility alone could not: machine reading at the scale of the archive itself. Why scale? Historical research moves through stages: reading, extracting, structuring, analyzing, visualizing, asking new questions. Each works on a single document but breaks at archive scale. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty hold roughly 384,000 articles across five centuries. Reconstructing the careers of even one generation of officials requires linking and reasoning across more material than a single researcher can manage.

In this talk I draw on several ongoing projects, including a vision-language model fine-tuned for Manchu and an agent-based record-linkage system across the Annals and the Bangmok (civil-examination rosters), to argue that AI does not replace any step in this sequence; it changes the scale at which each becomes possible. The Manchu model does not read more carefully than a Manchu specialist, but it makes an entire archive legible. The linkage system does not match identities more carefully than a historian by hand, but it tracks the same person across sources that no individual could reconcile end to end. Once reading, linkage, and structuring scale up, questions of a different order become askable: not one official’s career, but a generation’s; not one local pattern, but the structure of bureaucratic mobility across five centuries. The historian’s craft is unchanged; what changes is what becomes askable. To be a historian in the age of AI is to treat discovery, when the data itself begins to suggest the questions, as a stage of the craft.

About the speaker:

Dr. Donghyeok Choi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. He holds a Ph.D. from KAIST’s Graduate School of Culture Technology (2024) and a B.A. in History and a B.E. in Computer Science Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University. He applies computational and quantitative methods to East Asian history and builds AI-assisted research infrastructure for the humanities. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

The 2026 European Network of Korean Resources Specialists Workshop, June 3–6

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Dear users,

 

From June 3–6, 2026, CrossAsia and Freie Universität Berlin will co-host the 2026 European Network of Korean Resources Specialists (ENKRS) Workshop, the annual meeting of information specialists working for Korean materials and Korean Studies collections.

Founded in 2018, ENKRS held its inaugural workshop at Freie Universität Berlin. Over the past eight years, the network has developed into Europe’s leading professional community for Korean Studies librarianship. Following its relaunch after the pandemic, ENKRS has held annual workshops in several countries including the Netherlands, France, and the Czech Republic.

The 2026 workshop returns to Berlin under the theme, Heritage and Horizons: From Historical Collections to the Age of AI. The programme will examine the relationship between historical collections, digital scholarship, and emerging technologies in the field of Korean Studies, bringing together about fifty librarians, archivists, and researchers from Europe, the Republic of Korea, and North America.

The full programme is now available at:
https://www.enkrs.net/2026-berlin

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Korea Foundation for its continued support of ENKRS. Its sponsorship has been essential to the development of the network and to fostering international collaboration in Korean Studies librarianship across Europe.

Those interested in attending conference sessions are invited to contact Dr. Jing Hu (jing.hu@sbb.spk-berlin.de) for further information. We look forward to welcoming colleagues and guests to Berlin for four days of discussion and exchange.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

CrossAsia Talks: Patrick Hällzon 28. Mai 2026

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(See English below)

Freuen Sie sich mit uns auf Dr. Patrick Hällzon (Uppsala University) und seinen Online-Vortrag am 28. Mai 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) zum Thema “The use of domestic and wild animals in public performances in the oases of Eastern Turkestan“.

This online presentation deals with public performances involving animals in Eastern Turkestan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several traditional pastimes in the region, such as pigeon fancying, falconry, and various games related to horsemanship fit into this description. The focus of this presentation, however, will be on the usage of domestic and wild animals in performed entertainment in public places.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf Mastodon und BlueSky an.

—

Dr. Patrick Hällzon (Uppsala University) will give a talk on 28 May 2026 at 6 pm (Berlin time), offering an insight into his current research under the title ‘The use of domestic and wild animals in public performances in the oases of Eastern Turkestan’. The lecture will take place online.

This online presentation deals with public performances involving animals in Eastern Turkestan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several traditional pastimes in the region, such as pigeon fancying, falconry, and various games related to horsemanship fit into this description. The focus of this presentation, however, will be on the usage of domestic and wild animals in performed entertainment in public places.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will also be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia Talks: Joshua Fogel 3.12.2026

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(See English below)

Am 3. Dezember 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) laden wir zu unserem letzten CrossAsia Talk im Jahr 2026 ein: Joshua A. Fogel (York University, Kanada) beleuchtet in seinem Onlinevortrag “Back to Babel: The Esperanto Movements in Japan and China” die faszinierende Geschichte der Esperanto-Bewegung in Ostasien und ihre ganz unterschiedlichen Entwicklungen in Japan und China im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Seien Sie dabei!

In the first decades of the 20th century, the movement to spread use of a universal language for all mankind came to East Asia. Launched by Ludwik Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887, Japan and China proved to be fertile ground for the Esperanto movement. However, Zamenhof purposefully constructed Esperanto as an auxiliary language, never meant to replace natural languages, but only to facilitate communication among the peoples and alleviate all misunderstanding, leading to world peace. In East Asia, different political and social movements hooked up with it and lead to interesting eventualities. In the first decade of the 20th century, some Chinese saw it as a panacea for China’s decrepit state (as they saw things) and wanted it to replace Chinese altogether; this led to ferocious debates involved people in Paris, Tokyo, and even China. In Japan, a wide array of scholars, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and others saw it as a way for Japan to merge with the grand movement uniting the world via a shared language. From the middle of the second decade, things changed in both countries. In interested, come hear this talk!

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem Mastodon-Account und BlueSky an.

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On 3 December 2026 from 6 pm (Berlin time), we invite you to our final CrossAsia Talk of 2026: In his online lecture “Back to Babel: The Esperanto Movements in Japan and China”, Joshua A. Fogel (York University, Canada) will shed light on the fascinating history of the Esperanto movement in East Asia and its very different developments in Japan and China in the early 20th century. Join us!

In the first decades of the 20th century, the movement to spread use of a universal language for all mankind came to East Asia. Launched by Ludwik Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887, Japan and China proved to be fertile ground for the Esperanto movement. However, Zamenhof purposefully constructed Esperanto as an auxiliary language, never meant to replace natural languages, but only to facilitate communication among the peoples and alleviate all misunderstanding, leading to world peace. In East Asia, different political and social movements hooked up with it and lead to interesting eventualities. In the first decade of the 20th century, some Chinese saw it as a panacea for China’s decrepit state (as they saw things) and wanted it to replace Chinese altogether; this led to ferocious debates involved people in Paris, Tokyo, and even China. In Japan, a wide array of scholars, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and others saw it as a way for Japan to merge with the grand movement uniting the world via a shared language. From the middle of the second decade, things changed in both countries. In interested, come hear this talk!

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

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You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon-Account and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
Fremdenführer durch das Kriegsgefangenenlager Bando, Japan : herausgegeben von der Lagerdruckerei Bando gelegentlich der Ankunft der von Kurume nach Bando verlegten Kameraden, August 1918. Krieg 1914/25024. Public Domain 1.0

Im Fokus: Materialien aus dem Kriegsgefangenenlager Bandō (Japan)

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Wir freuen uns, am Mittwoch, 10. Juni 2026 von 16-17 Uhr im Rahmen der Stabi-Veranstaltungsreihe „Im Fokus: Auf Entdeckungsreise durch unsere Sammlungen“ einen Einblick in unsere Sammlung zu geben.

Vorgestellt werden Materialien aus dem Kriegsgefangenenlager Bandō (Japan).

Während des Ersten Weltkriegs befanden sich rund 1000 Deutsche im Lager Bandō (Japan) in japanischer Kriegsgefangenschaft. Sie entwickelten ein vielfältiges Lagerleben mit Theater- und Konzertaufführungen, druckten Zeitungen, betätigten sich sportlich und boten diverse Gewerke im Lager an. Vorgestellt werden ausgewählte Lagerdrucke und Fotos aus dem Bestand der Stabi sowie der Bandō-Sammlung des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien (Depositum).

Ansprechpartnerin: Dr. Ursula Flache

Termin: Mittwoch, 10. Juni 2026, 16-17 Uhr

Veranstaltungsort: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Haus Potsdamer Str. 33, 10785 Berlin, Konferenzraum 1

Treffpunkt: am Einlass zum Lesesaal

Bitte beachten Sie, dass eine Anmeldung erforderlich ist.

Die Veranstaltungsreihe „Im Fokus: Auf Entdeckungsreise durch unsere Sammlungen“ zeigt jeden Monat ein ausgewähltes besonderes Objekt aus den Sammlungen der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – von aktueller Buchkunst bis zu gefälschten Zeitungen. In kleiner Runde können Sie die Stücke aus nächster Nähe betrachten und mit unseren Expert:innen ins Gespräch kommen.

 

Während der Veranstaltung werden Video- und Bildaufnahmen für die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin angefertigt. Mit Ihrer Anmeldung stimmen Sie der Veröffentlichung zu nichtkommerziellen Zwecken zu.

 

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas

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Dear users,

On May 21st at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the fourth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will feature a joint presentation by Dr. CHEN Shih-Pei and Dr. Mariana Favila Vázquez, titled “Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas.” In this talk, Dr. Chen and Dr. Favila Vázquez will present and compare their digital approaches to analyzing geographical knowledge in early modern China and the Spanish Empire.

How did early modern empires come to know their vast territories, especially the remote regions at their peripheries? In a recent book titled “Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue”, scholars explore how the Spanish and the Chinese empires developed comparable ways to gather, organize, and use knowledge about their local worlds. The Spanish Empire compiled the Relaciones Geográficas (trans. relational geographies) that surveyed the indigenous peoples, lands, and natural resources of its newly acquired, remote territories. In parallel, the Chinese officials compiled difangzhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) since the 12th century to document the local landscapes, people, flora, and fauna of each regions within the vast empire.

In this CrossAsia DH Lunch talk, two authors who contributed to this book will talk about how they each designed digital analytical tools to help grasp the overall structures of these two genres, given their large amount and rich contents. Shih-Pei Chen will introduce a quantitative analysis based on the section headings of local gazetteers within LoGaRT (Local Gazetteers Research Tools). She argues, the sections headings of each local gazetteer are conscious selection made by its compilers as to how to best describe and document a region, and thus they should be treated as knowledge categories. In this session, she will show how it looks like when analyzing all the section headings from 4000 gazetteers together: it reveals a dynamic structure of “local knowledge” of historical China that is jointly defined by imperial guidelines and local officials across geographical regions over 800 years.

Mariana Favila Vázquez will introduce the case of the sixteenth-century Relaciones Geográficas, a documentary corpus produced in response to a questionnaire of fifty questions circulated in 1577. The questionnaire was commissioned by King Philip II and distributed through the Council of the Indies as part of a broader effort by the Spanish Crown to gather systematic information about its American territories. The instructions and interrogatory were prepared under the direction of the royal cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco and sent to local authorities in New Spain, who were responsible for compiling the responses.

This session will present a case study based on the information contained in the responses from the former Bishopric of Michoacán, with particular attention to references to inland bodies of water. It will also outline the methodology of Geographical Text Analysis, which enables the creation of digital annotations using historically relevant semantic categories and the linking of identified toponyms to their corresponding geographic coordinates, making it possible to conduct subsequent spatial analyses.

The works featured in this talk can also be found at “Part 2: Structures of Knowing” in Knowing an Empire, which is open access and can be read online at Fulcrum.org.

About the speakers:

Dr. CHEN Shih-pei is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and a specialist in Digital Humanities. She desgins digital research methods, tools, and infrastructures to help historians engage with digitized historical materials from new perspectives. She has led the development of several DH projects, including the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT); CHMap as a website hosting open-access historical maps of China (in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University);  RISE & SHINE as an API protocols for the standardized exchange of digital texts among digital tools and content providers. At MPIWG, she is now leading another research project: “Common Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th–20th Centuries,” which investigate how the Chinese daily-use encyclopedias to examine how “common knowledge” in Chinese history evolved and diverged from elite and literati genres.

Dr. Mariana Favila Vázquez is an archaeologist, and holds an MA and a PhD in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research focuses on pre-Hispanic and colonial navigation, cultural landscapes, and the use of digital technologies and spatial analysis in historical research. She is the author of Veredas de Mar y Río. Navegación prehispánica y colonial en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz (UNAM, 2016) and Navegación prehispánica en Mesoamérica (BAR Publishing, 2020), as well as several articles and book chapters. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Lancaster University and at UNAM’s Institute of Geography. She is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City Unit, in the area of Ethnohistory, where she is developing a project on lacustrine landscapes and digital humanities. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNII), Level 1.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

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You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.