Conference on Sun Yat-sen and others, and others

Next year, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China, which brought an end to the 2000-year-old imperial dynastic rule in China. The National University of Singapore takes the initiatives to organise the conference on Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Chinese Revolution with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and the Chinese Heritage Centre on 25-26 October 2010 in Singapore.

Proposed themes are Sun Yat-sen, Japan and Nanyang; Sun Yat-sen in the Straits Settlements; Sun Yat-sen and Prominent Nanyang Chinese; Nanyang and Financing Chinese Revolutions; Sun Yat-sen and the Emergence of Chinese Modernity; Revisiting the Study of Sun Yat-sen in Nanyang; and etc.

Would you be interested in dryland people and environments? Could scholars in urban studies be engaged in this field of enquiry? Why not? The School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, has the answer by organising the First Oxford Interdisciplinary Desert Conference: Integrating Research, Expanding Knowledge on 15-16 April 2010 at Oxford.

Desert research might sound daunting. Themes for exploration are nevertheless multifarious, such as water and deserts; governing the landscape; deserts and environmental change; sacred and secular heritage studies; sand over the Sahara, Sonora, Simpson...; urban desert environment; health of the deserts; and etc. I hope Chinese scholars in Dunghuang would participate in this interesting conference.

Why has China been going strong in the UNESCO world heritage list only after the Cold War in recent decades whereas another Asian country also with long historical tradition, India, has gained its prominent place as early as in the 1980s? Is it a reflection of the rise of China? A two-day conference to be held in Heidelberg, Germany might give a clue. Organised by the International Scientific Committee for the UNESCO History Project and hosted by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, the upcoming UNESCO History Conference titled UNESCO and the Cold War" will be held on 4-5 March 2010 to explore the influence of the Cold War and the tension between the two conflicting ideological blocs on the UNESCO and the contribution of the latter to connect and reconcile the opposing confrontation.