Partnership between the University of Exeter and Peking University expands

The joint work between Exeter and Peking University was discussed at an event involving 35 academics from both institutions who met at Peking University to discuss research they will carry out together. The two-day conference – the Exeter-PKU Forum – took place in Beijing on 15 and 16 April.

This is the first joint event between academics from Peking University’s School of Foreign Languages and two of Exeter’s academic Colleges: Humanities, and Social Sciences and International Studies.

Experts will carry out joint research and publish their work in Chinese, English, French, German and Russian. This new development follows several years of collaborative work between Exeter and Peking faculty in History, Modern Languages and English.

Organiser Professor Emma Cayley, Head of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Exeter, said: “We are delighted to be collaborating with colleagues from one of China’s most prestigious universities, and this builds on the growing collaboration between our two institutions over the past few years.

“This conference will allow us to discuss future work, which will be based on the common interests of our world-leading researchers. We will work together to challenge perceptions.”

At the Forum academics discussed a range of topics, including national identity, immigration and diaspora, reading and writing across borders and blurred lines between history and literature.

Research presented by Exeter faculty included representations of China in the nineteenth century; modernism and Samuel Beckett; and obscenity and magic in Arabic literature.