IWLC Academics

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.

IWLC has seven academic series.

(1)    IWLC Forum for Global Humanities

(2)    Tsinghua-IWLC Forum

(3)    IWLC International Symposia of “World Maps and World Cultures”

(4)    IWLC Seminars in Global Humanities

(5)    IWCL Lunch Talks

(6)    Symposium of Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows

(7)    Co-curriculum Lecture Series of Critical Humanities

Up till now, IWLC has held 17seminars in global humanities, 3 Tsinghua-IWLC Forums, 7 International Symposia of “World Maps and World Cultures”, 8 lunch talks, 3 Forum for Global Humanities, 1 Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows Symposium, 1 Co-curriculum Lectures Series of Critical Humanities.