Conference

Language and Culture in the Borderlands of the Eastern Silk Road

 

The civilizations of the Ancient Silk Road networks are rightfully famous for their cultural multiplicity. Modern scholarship has likewise profited enormously from the collaboration of various disciplines concerned with this multidimensional heritage. The conference is organized by multiple research units in Vienna ranging from linguistics, philology, history to the digital humanities with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary research questions and methodologies. The Excellence Cluster “EurAsian Transformations” functions as one of the conveners, as well as the Austrian Academy of Sciences Commission “Transformation Processes and Empire in the Ancient Afro-Eurasian Worlds”.

The program can be found at the conference website via https://viennaborderlandsconference.wordpress.com/program/ and covers topics from linguistics, philology, cultural connectivity, (art) history, religious studies and many others.

Furthermore, invited are three highly distinguished and renown scholars of their respective fields as keynote speakers:

Wednesday, September 4th: Georges-Jean Pinault (École Pratique des Hautes Études), The rise of Tocharian literacy during the 1st millennium CE

Thursday, September 5th: Carmen Meinert (CERES Bochum), The Buddhicisation of Eastern Central Asia under the Rule of Central Asian People

 Friday, September 6th: Imre Galambos (Zhejiang University), Chinese manuscripts in a transcultural perspective

 

The conference takes place from Wednesday, September 4, to Friday, September 6, at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is concluded by an Early Career Researcher Workshop on Saturday, September 7, at the University of Vienna.

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