Research Activities

Dates: 15 and 16 February 2012. Venue: Main Meeting Room, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo abstracts: PDF(416KB) schedule >>  Day One: Money as Social Circuit: anonymous currency and named credit (Toyota Foundation Research Project, D10-R-0091) 930-1010 Kuroda Akinobu , U Tokyo, Unfixed Money: Revisiting Global Monetary History from Mezzoscopic Viewpoint Comments by Farley Grubb, U Delaware Chaired by Cha Myung Soo, Yeungnam 1020-1140 Laurence Fontaine , CNRS, CMH-ENS-EHESS, Money as Social Circuit: The Circulation of Objects and Credit in Early Modern Europe Leigh Gardner , London School of Economics, Money and Credit in Medieval Europe and Colonial Africa: A Comparative Study Comments by Bruno Théret, CNRS,

Rethinking of the Role of China and Japan in the Early Modern World: The Great Reversal Following the academic agreement concluded last year by our institute, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University and East AsianProgram at Princeton University, Professor Benjamin Elman, Chair of Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University gave a special lecture at our institute. Date: June 6, 2011 (Mon) Time: 15:30 – 17:30 Title: Rethinking of the Role of China and Japan in the Early Modern World: The Great Reversal Lecturer: Professor Benjamin Elman, Chair of Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University Moderator: Professor HANEDA Masashi, Director of Institute for Advanced Studies

Seminar on “How to Use AsiaBarometer,” which is one of the activities of “Frontier of Comparative Studies of Asian Societies” financially supported by the JSPS Asia-Africa Scientific Platform Program, was hel on 11th and 12th of July, 2011. This is the second round of the seminar, following the patterns of last year’s. All the participants, 2 from South Korea, 4 from China, 3 from Taiwan, attended whole the seminar. They listened to Prof. Sonoda’s lecture on the brief history of AsiaBarometer and its contents of the research as well as Prof. Zong-rong Lee’s speech on his experience of using AsiaBarometer dataset in the last round. After that, they presented their

Islamic Modernism and the Question of Eurocentric Global Intellectual History Date:  June 1, 2011 Time:  18:00-19:30 Venue:   Main Meeting Room 1(3rd floor), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo), Hongo Campus, the University of Tokyo Title:   Islamic Modernism and the Question of Eurocentric Global Intellectual History Speaker:   Professor Cemil Aydin (George Mason University) About Speaker:   Cemil Aydin is IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies and Associate Professor of History at the Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, where he also serves as Director of Ali Vurak Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies. Professor Aydin’s numerous publications include: The Politics of Anti-Westernism in

Title : “< Sözüm> Document of Timur” LecturSpeaker: ONO Hiroshi (Professor, Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Tachibana College) Date : Thursday 16 June 2011 Time and venue: 17:00-19:00, at No.2 Meeting Room in IASA Language : Japanese Entry: Admission free. No registration required Enquiry: Haneda Masashi. haneda@ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp, 03-5841-5883  

Kazuo Morimoto gave a lecture at the Mohaqqeq Tabatabai Islamic Foundation in Qom, Islamic Republic of Iran. The lecture, delivered in Persian language, was titled “The Institution of Niqabat al-Sadat before the Mongol Period.” The lecture was followed by an active Q & A session, in which Morimoto profited from comments and ideas of colleagues in Qom with rather a different academic background. Morimoto, being introduced by Hojjat ‘l-Eslam Sayyed Ali Tababayi Yazdi, Director of MTIF. Morimoto, during the lecture

” 1.Own research: The Ritual Civilization: Western Understandings of Confucianism 2.An Introduction to the International Journal of Asian Studies (IJAS) The 1st Staff Seminar 2012 at IASA was held in the afternoon of 14 June 2012. Associate Professor Robert Lawrence Chard gave two lectures before nearly 20 participants. In the first, titled “The Ritual Civilization: Western Understandings of Confucianism,” he described how Confucianism was historically taken by Western observers as a key to understanding Chinese civilization, culture and society, and how that approach still influences on modern Western scholarship on China today. In the following lively discussion, Chard and the participants discussed many topics, including how Asian scholars might have

Local History in the Context of World / Global History: Case Studies in Cultural History Following the academic agreement concluded last year by Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University and East Asian Program at Princeton University, the First Fudan, Princeton and Todai Conference was held as below. Title: Local History in the Context of World / Global History: Case Studies in Cultural History Date & Time: From 9:00 to 17:45, Monday, December 19th, 2011. From 9:00 to 13:15, Tuesday, December 20th, 2011. Venue: Koshiba Hall, Faculty of Science Bldg. 1, School of Science, The University of Tokyo (7-3-1 Hongo,

A summer school “Asian Art, Religion and Historical Studies”, organized by National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University and supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo and the Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University, started on 24 June at Fudan University in Shanghai. Attend it 14 graduate students from North American and European universities and the same number of graduate students from Fudan and other universities in Shanghai. Two distinguished professors from three institutions will give a lecture of three hours each and two hours of discussion are scheduled at the end of a day. From our institute, Director Oki and Professor

January 11 (Tuesday), 2011 Venue: 1st Conference room, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo   Date: 15:00-17:00, January 11 (Tuesday), 2011   Speaker : Dr. Stefan Baums（UC, Berkeley）   Title : Gāndhārī Buddhist Commentaries: Their Exegetical Technique and Relationship to Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist Literature   ★Chair Associate Prof. BABA Norihisa(Department of south asian studies, University of Tokyo)          

【Report】 A Tobunken seminar “THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE and THE CAUCASUS in WWI” by ARSLAN Ozan, Lecturer, Department of International Relations and the European Union, Izmir University of Economics was held on Wednesday 21 June.　Here is the brief resume of the conference. Department of International Relations and the European Union, Izmir University of Economics The Great War in the Caucasus covers the period of November 1914 to November 1918. It does not include only the Russian and Ottoman naval and military operations in the Black Sea, the Transcaucasus, Eastern Anatolia and the Northwest Persia between 1914 and 1917 but also a short Ottomano-Transcaucasian war as well as Turkish, British and German

On December 5 (Mon) Professor Kazuo Morimoto gave a lecture at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli, l’Orientali (UNIOR), Tobunken’s new partner in Italy on account of the exchange agreement the two institutions signed in the current academic year. In the first part of the lecture, entitled “How to Behave toward Sayyids and Sharifs: A Trans-sectarian Tradition of Dream Accounts,” Morimoto presented the contour and aims of “sayyido-sharifology” he advocates. He then proceeded to discuss the findings of the most recent study he has conducted in the mentioned subject. During his five-day stay at Napoli from December 3 to 7, Morimoto discussed different possibilities of future cooperation between the two

A Chinese daily newspaper, Dongfang Zaobao, based at Shanghai, published an interview of Professor Haneda Masashi on the front page of its weekly magazine, Shanghai Review of Books. Professor Haneda explains in detail his concept of new world history there. The interviewer heard Professor Haneda’s lecture on the idea of new world history given at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies of Fudan University on the 1 June and requested to interview him later. Professor Haneda is conducting a joint research project on new world history with more than fifty colleagues funded by the JSPS grant-in-aid. The interview published in Chinese could encourage further his collaboration with international researchers. Interview（PDF,864KB)

Todai Forum 2011 in France was held in the middle of October at Paris and Lyon. It is a kind of academic festival organized by the University of Tokyo in collaboration with numerous French institutions. On 20 and 21 October, IASA held a conference entitled “Local History in the Context of Global History” at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon with the full-scale cooperation of the Institut d’Asie Orientale. From IASA, Director Haneda Masashi, Professors Kuroda Akinobu and Yasutomi Ayumu and Assistant Professor Tsuji Asuka took part in the conference. As a token of close and friendly relationship with our institute, two Chinese scholars coming from the Institute of Advanced

On 1st June, Professor Haneda Masashi, invited by the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University, gave a lecture entitled ” Designing a New World History”. He criticized the current Japanese interpretation of euro-centric world history and explained three ways of describing a new world history, which will underline the commonality of various people on the globe. The discussion after the lecture was very alived by a number of questions asked by young students. This Lecture is introduced by Fudan University: http://www.iahs.fudan.edu.cn/cn/news.asp?action=page&id=386

Following the academic agreement concluded last year by our institute, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University and East Asian Program at Princeton University, the East Asian Studies Department of Princeton University generously sent us more than forty books published recently by the staffs of the department. Three huge volumes on the history of Science in China by Professor Benjamin Elman, chair of the department, are among them. We will conserve these precious books in our library and put them to public use as soon as possible.  

The conference titled “Iran, Art and Society” was held with Dr. David Galloway, the former chief curator of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977, on the 5th of November, 2011. Art in Iran is often categorized as “Middle Eastern” or “Islamic”. However, by considering art in Iran in relation to the worldwide art scene by focusing on the role of museum, the conference aimed at deepening the discussion of how to write the world history more effectively. Firstly, Dr. Galloway introduced the cultural background. Secondly, Terada Yuki interviewed Dr. Galloway and asked about the relation between the art in Iran and the worldwide art scene.