As part of Tsinghua University’s strategic deployment towards the goal of building a world-class university, and as a measure of global innovation, the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures (IWLC) is a university-level institute for research and teaching, and its main function is to foster and conduct new and cutting-edge research in the global humanities. By constructing a multi-lingual, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural platform for teaching and research in the humanities, as well as addressing common issues of the contemporary world, the IWLC gathers and trains the next generation of leaders who are capable of grasping variable logics of different civilizations in an international environment and adept at “narrating a changing China by interpreting the changing world” in answer to the demands for the humanities posed by Chinese academia and the nation’s strategy.
Since the approval of its founding on December 25, 2014, various projects have been undertaken by the IWLC. Its founding ceremony was held on April 12, 2016. Subsequently, the IWLC has held sixteen “Seminars in Global Humanities,” lectures by globally renowned senior scholars. Rooted in the Tsinghua tradition of “connecting the East and the West, bridging the past and the present, and intertwining humanistic and scientific ideas,” and oriented by the contemporary and future demand for cross-cultural talents, the IWLC mission include the cultivation of bilingual and/or multilingual proficiency, cross-cultural perspectives, and the ability to conduct international dialogues based on Chinese values. The founding of the experimental Class for World Literatures and Cultures was the initial attempt to practice the missions above. As an important part of the implementation of the IWLC missions, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures underwent a disciplinary restructuring and established eight disciplinary groups according to each discipline’s research topics in 2015. The IWLC and the Department will cooperate and progress together, promoting the development of the eight disciplinary groups by way of talent introduction and discipline innovation.
In cooperation with the long-established Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, the IWLC founded the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows in April 2016, creating the institutional mechanism for introducing first-rank young scholars from Europe and America to China. In September 2016, three post-doctoral scholars who respectively graduated from the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and Princeton University became the first group of young fellows of Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows. In September 2017, another three fellows from the University of Michigan and John-Hopkins University joined the Society. In September 2018, three fellows from Harvard University, Yale University and Michigan University joined the Society. Up to now, nine young international scholars have joined the teaching team of the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures.
The IWLC consists of two research centers and one forum (in preparation) – the Center for Cross-Cultural Theory (the “theory center”), the John King Fairbank Center for American Cultural Studies (the “cultural center”), and the Forum for Global Area Studies and Cultures (the “global cultural forum”). The main tasks of the IWLC’s research team and faculty members include China-UK, Sino-US, and trans-Pacific cross-cultural studies, as well as the expansion of cross-cultural dialogues.
Official Accounts
