About

This seminar seeks to make Chinese studies more interdisciplinary by crossing the area studies approach—with all that this entails in terms of fieldwork and recourse to primary sources in vernacular languages—with more social science approaches. To this end, we often deliberately invite a discussant who is not a specialist of the Chinese field. The approach we tend to encourage in this perspective is therefore that of the comparative historical sociology of politics which, from a methodological point of view, seeks to compare research experiences, not in order to identify common denominators or find causal explanations, but in order to better analyze historical practices and moments by understanding them in all their contingency.

Furthermore, this seminar will not only focus on the People’s Republic of China but also on all other parts of the Chinese world: overseas Chinese communities, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. In addition to ongoing research, this seminar will also focus on recent publications.