A counter tour of the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery. The gallery presents its collections as a product of an “age of discovery” when Europeans set out to explore new worlds, collect representative objects and, in the process, create new fields of knowledge such as botany, philology and anthropology.  We will reconsider the collection by recognising that this was also a European “age of empires” in East and South Asia. 

This event is linked to the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) research grant East Asian Uses of the European Past. The grant explores how chronotypes - collocations of historical time such as ‘the renaissance’ or ‘the enlightenment’ - have been co-produced by European and East Asian intellectuals.  

Jon Chappell is conducting postdoctoral research on Chinese thinkers’ uses of European imperial history as part of the HERA project. Prior to joining LSE, he was a Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. He holds a PhD in Chinese History from the University of Bristol.

Leigh Jenco is Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Government and the principal investigator of the HERA project. Before coming to the LSE in 2012, Leigh Jenco taught at the National University of Singapore and Brown University.  She situates her work and teaching at the intersection of Chinese and contemporary Euro-American theories of politics. Her current research compares Chinese, Dutch and Japanese colonial discourse on Taiwan, from the 17th century to the present.  With colleagues at the universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Madrid, she manages a Humanities in the European Research Area grant for the collaborative research project “East Asian Uses of the European Past: Tracing Braided Chronotypes” (2016-2019). She is also associate editor of the American Political Science Review.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival #NewWorldDisorders

This event is part of the LSE Festival: New World (Dis)Orders running from Monday 25 February to Saturday 2 March 2019, with a series of events exploring how social science can tackle global problems.