WHY STUDY HISTORY? From Silk Roads to Social Media

with  Prof. Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

WHAT: RASBJ online seminar led by Prof. Peter Frankopan, followed by Q&A
WHEN: May 13, 2020, Wednesday 19:00-19.50 Beijing Standard Time
WHERE: Online via Zoom
HOW TO REGISTER: Advance registration is required; RASBJ members and its invitees have been emailed the registration link; non-members please see “How to become an RASBJ member”

HOW MUCH: Free, and accessible exclusively to members of RASBJ and its invitees worldwide.

HOW TO BECOME AN RASBJ MEMBER: If you’d like to become an RASBJ member (or, for PRC passport-holders, to become an Associate) please befriend Treasurer John Olbrich on Wechat at johnobeijing and send him your name, nationality, mobile number and email address plus the annual subscription amount (or, for Associates, the suggested donation) of RMB 300 for those resident in China, RMB 200 for those resident overseas and RMB 100 for students. If you join RASBJ by May 11 you’ll receive login details for this event.

MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Is the centre of global economic, political and gravity moving to Asia? Is fake news undermining the credibility of studying history? How will social media and entertainment add to our social history, and is Tik Tok the latest ambassador for exchanging ideas along the Silk Roads? Professor Frankopan wants to lead a lively discussion about the nature, importance and use of history. He rewrote world history in his book The Silk Roads, a New York Times Bestseller, one of the Sunday Times Books of the Decade and named as ‘not only the most important book written in years, but the most important written in decades’. In his most recent book, The New Silk Roads, he argues that ‘all roads used to lead to Rome; today they lead to Beijing’. These two books raise profound questions about history, especially when new technologies, rising geopolitical tensions and pandemics are changing the world we live in.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of  the Oxford  Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College. He has been Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton, Scaliger Visiting Professor at Leiden and Presidential Scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In 2019 he was named one of the World’s Top 50 Thinkers by Prospect Magazine. Peter advises many governments, corporations and multi-lateral institutions around the world. He works on the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, Iran, Russia, Central Asia, South Asia and China.
RASBJ’s upcoming Zoom talks include:

_{5/20 Guiseppe Cuccia on “Turandot and Western Opera in China”;
5/27 Michael Humphries on “Contagion, China and How Covid Will End”;
6/3 Isaac Duffy on “The Pagoda Project”;
6/10 Prof. Ezra Vogel on China-Japan Relations}