This interdisciplinary conversation, bringing together specialists in Chinese history, literature and politics, will move from the year of the Boxers through the time of Tiananmen. The focus will be on the politics of memory and the different ways that contested events have been brought into or left out of narratives about China's past circulating inside that country and in other parts of the world. Moderator Todd Hall, Director of the University of Oxford China Centre, will be joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a cultural historian at UC Irvine who is spending the spring in London as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, and local faculty members Margaret Hillenbrand of Wadham College and Patricia Thornton of Merton College. Between them, the panellists have written about many key events of the late Qing, Republican, Mao, and post-Mao eras.
