Date: Thursday, May 23, 2019
Location: The Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA Harvard University
Co-organizers: Wen-Yi Huang and Xiaofei Tian
Sponsored by: Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
As one of the most critical global issues of the twenty-first century, migration is often regarded as a recent phenomenon associated with modernization and industrialization. However, the phenomenon of migration has been indispensable to human histories, and the role of migration and migrants in shaping the world was as great in the past as it is today. Indeed, from the third to the sixth century CE, migration, either internal or external, fundamentally shaped the world that is now called “China.” We hope to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to share their thoughts on migration in this crucial period. Our goal is to contribute to a better understanding of a phenomenon of utmost political, social, economic, and cultural significance in early medieval China, and to shed light on broader issues concerning the rationale for mobility, the features of personal and cultural identities, and the production and consumption of cultural memory. In so doing, we aim to achieve results that can be used for research on migration and mobility in other periods, including those in present-day societies.