On October 22-23 faculty and PhD students from the CEU Medieval Studies Department participated in a conference hosted by Beijing Normal University on the theme of “Social control and the issues of scale”. This event was the latest result of an on-going program of cooperation between the BNU School of History and our department, a cooperative effort that goes back almost five years now. Several of our faculty have been invited to give lecture series at Beijing Normal University. Two years ago we held the first joint conference with faculty from Beijing Normal University here at CEU. We have also hosted some BNU PhD students her for semester-long visits and graduated one former BNU undergraduate from our two-year MA program.
Following fruitful discussions with BNU faculty following the conference we agreed that the next conference will be held here in Budapest in 2018. In the meantime, we will work together to develop more faculty and PhD student exchanges and perhaps even develop a joint project around the theme of interactions between State-level societies and politically less complex populations.
Such collaborative programs with boost the visibility of the university around the world and in China in particular. This conference has certainly stimulated our faculty and participating PhD students to think about the permeability of the geographic and thought borders former scholarship has tended to draw around our two regions.
Alice M. Choyke
