A Year Has Passed
The renewal of our website was an opportunity for us to create a new platform to reach a much wider audience. I am referring to the new blog section, where members of Tokyo College can share their thoughts and feelings regularly with the readers.
With the start of 2020, an assistant professor, a postdoctoral researcher, and one new project researcher have been appointed to the college. Moreover, Professor Ge Zhaoguang of Fudan University (China) will be visiting as an invited researcher from overseas and will stay with us till the end of August. Among the foreign scholars who have joined the team: Professor Viktoria Eschbach-Szabó of the University of Tübingen (Germany) has been with us since last October, and Andrew Gordon of Harvard University (USA) will be with us from this weekend. We will invite many more researchers from overseas to visit Tokyo College at the same time. Currently, a large number of the members are researchers in the humanities, but soon others in the various fields of science will be joining us.
I had a “dream” when I first envisioned Tokyo College. A dream where scholars working in different fields who could talk about their research, share their insights stimulating each other, and gain from this interaction new ideas and perspectives for their next research. As a first step toward making this dream a reality, the College officials gathered for the first time for lunch on January 17. That first time, we only introduced ourselves and the college. However, we plan to hold regular lunch meetings and use them as a place for research exchange.
Also, starting next month, researchers at the college will hold a series of seminars on “identity” as a follow-up to the panel discussion titled “Global History of Identity” held in September last year. We will consider organizing another event to share with students and the general public any remarkable outcomes, if some will emerge.
Of the several faces that Tokyo College has, the lectures and symposia are, of course, the most important. However, I hope that Tokyo College will be a place to create cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary research results which is shared with students and the general public. Although it is a small organization, and is less than a year since its creation, its structure is gradually being established.
Thank you for your support.
