SPEAKER BIO
DAVID ARMITAGE is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches international history and intellectual history.
He is also an Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney, and an Honorary Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast.
A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on six continents and has held research fellowships and visiting positions in Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Korea, and the United States.
He is the author or editor of seventeen books, among them Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), The History Manifesto (co-auth., 2014), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Oceanic Histories (co-ed., 2018), The Law of Nations in Global History (co-ed., 2017), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (co-ed., 2014), and The Age of Revolutions in Global Context (co-ed., 2010).
He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
LECTURE INFORMATION
Lecture 1. Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past
Date: May 14, 2018 14:30
Location: Room 208, Building 2, Jing Yuan
Host: Geng Tian (Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Peking University)
Abstract: Big is back across a wide range of historical fields. Many historians are stretching space, to create international, transnational and global histories. Others are expanding time, to pursue Big History, Deep History and the history of the Anthropocene. What explains this broadening of horizons? How might transnational and transtemporal history be linked? And what do they mean for the future of history?
Lecture 2. World History as Oceanic History: The Atlantic in Global Perspective
Date: May 16, 2018 14:30
Location: Room 208, Building 2, Jing Yuan
Host: Bozhong Li (Professor in the Department of History, Peking University)
Abstract: Until recently, most historians shared a prejudice in favor of the history of land, territory and their human inhabitants. Yet two-thirds of the world's surface is water and much of human history has been conducted on its shores, around its seas and across its oceans. This article proposes reimagining the history of the world through its oceans and seas and examines the multiple genealogies of oceanic history, Mediterranean, Pacific and Atlantic among them. It argues that these models do not exhaust the potential for an oceanic history of the world. It takes the example of the Atlantic and its history to show how models from other oceanic arenas can help us to open up new histories, of regions within larger oceans, of the transnational connections between oceans and of the world beneath the waves.
Lecture 3. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas
Date: May 17, 2018 14:30
Location: Room 208, Building 2, Jing Yuan
Host: Lixin Wang (Professor in the Department of History, Peking University)
Abstract: We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn’t, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe to our present day. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war “civil” often depend on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider. Calling a conflict a civil war can shape its outcome by determining whether outside powers choose to get involved or stand aside: from the American Revolution to the Second Gulf War, pivotal decisions have depended on such shifts of perspective. The age of civil war in the West may be over, but elsewhere in the last two decades it has exploded–from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, and most recently Syria. And populism in the West has increased political division, so that increasingly democratic politics looks like civil war by other means.
Lecture 4. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Cosmopolitanism and Civil War
Date: May 21, 2018 14:30
Location: Room 208, Building 2, Jing Yuan
Host: Qiang Li (Professor in the School of Government, Peking University)
Abstract: Contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism associate it with a fundamental commitment to dialogue, tolerance and ever-widening spheres of community and communication. It is opposed to other more conflictual values and ideologies, such as particularism and nationalism, and nourishes teleological histories of ‘civilization’ and pacification. This chapter questions such easy assumptions about cosmopolitanism by tracing its relationship with conceptions of civil conflict, focusing particularly on the Age of Revolutions as an era of conspicuous cosmopolitanism and proliferating civil wars. Cosmopolitanism and civil war were linked by the idea of the civitas, the organized human community which secures peace but which, as Roman authors from Cicero to Augustine had reminded later generations, was also the arena of recurrent and destructive conflict among fellow citizens or cives. This Roman tradition implied that to live in a civitas was to be prone to civil war; indeed, only the civilized could suffer civil war. Cosmopolitanism may have been envisaged as a salve, even a solution, for such conflict within civitates but its universalism had paradoxical unintended consequences. By expanding the boundaries of the civitas, cosmopolitanism extended the arena of civil conflict to encompass all humanity: as Marius Pontmercy asks in Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), ‘Civil war ... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as “foreign” war? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?’. And by implying that all humans were citizens of a single community, it also made thinkable ideas of ‘global civil war’ elaborated by Carl Schmitt and his followers and revived more recently by analysts of transnational terrorism.
Lecture Series: IHSS Honorary Visiting Professor David Armitage
Images: Wang Zihao, Zhang Xishu
Designer: Xu Haolun
Source: Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Peking University
联系客服
