SEAA News Blog

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Haifa 

 The Asian Sphere: Trans-Cultural Flows Program 

An Inter-University and Interdisciplinary Graduate Program 

Call for Enrollment of Doctoral Students (2021-22) 

 The Asian Sphere offers a unique opportunity for outstanding candidates at the PhD level to enroll in an international multidisciplinary inter-university graduate program focusing on the Asian continent. 

 The Asian Sphere is a joint Israeli program of the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa funded by the Humanities Fund of the Council for Higher Education in Israel and Yad Hanadiv. It is a structured graduate program of excellence that focuses on various aspects of the entire Asian continent as a continuous civilizational zone. It addresses cross-regional contacts and processes among Asian societies, cultures and states, as well as between Asia and other continents throughout history until present time. The program’s courses are taught in English. 

 Apart from a dynamic and exceptional environment of learning and research, the program offers scholarships for outstanding graduate students. The scholarships for PhD students are of the amount of 60,000 NIS per year for three years. 

 The Asian Sphere accepts students from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including Asian Studies, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Archaeology, Geography Political Science, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, Art History, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies,. Research topics are open and can deal with past or current societies. The core of the Asian Sphere teaching activity revolves around advanced seminars on trans-regional, trans-continental and trans-cultural themes, mostly taught by two or more internationally renowned scholars. In addition, students who are accepted to the program will participate in a yearly academic retreat, research trips in Israel and abroad, academic conferences and other activities. 

 For further information, visit our web site: http://asian-sphere.huji.ac.il/  

Oxford University and SOAS will jointly organize Understanding Authenticity in China’s Cultural Heritage Seminar Series via Zoom from January 27 to February 24, 2021. To receive the links for the talks, please register by sending an email to Drs Chris Foster & Anke Hein at: understandingauthenticity@gmail.com

By Gao Dalun, translated by Anke Hein

As the saying goes, “if you plant one seed of millet in the spring, you will harvest ten thousand grains in autumn.” After a year and a half of meticulous preparation, the archaeological ceramic specimen database of the Social Science Center has finally reached a preliminary completion. To display the full cultural and academic value of this archaeological achievement, allow for more people to learn about and make use of the collection to carry out archaeological research, and to stimulate the public's interest in archaeology and history, the Social Center held an opening ceremony for the "Ceramic Stories" exhibition on December 5, 2020. More than 40 researchers from archaeological and cultural institutions across the country gathered at the Southern University of Science and Technology to celebrate the completion of the collection. Among them were Prof. Zhou Yongming, Director of the Center for Social Sciences, Prof. Chen Yuehong, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Southern University of Science and Technology, Prof. Gao Dalun, former head of the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Archaeology and leading director of the Ceramic Specimen Collection at the Social Science Centre, Dr Yegor Grebnev, former doctoral and postdoctoral student at the University of Oxford and now postdoctoral researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, and various researchers focusing on ceramic studies, among them Gao Xuyang, DPhil student at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, who assisted in preparing the exhibition.

The Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies offers post-doctoral fellowships for the 2021-2022 academic year. The post-docs are open to scholars in the humanities and social sciences specializing in East Asia, especially China, Japan, Korea and Mongolia.

Fellowships are granted for one academic year or one semester. The starting date of the visit should not be later than four years after receipt of the doctoral degree; the fellow must hold a valid doctoral degree no later than October 2021.