Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities

Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities explores the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe which occurred during – and were formative of – the political and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, this volume seeks to situate these flows in a context of increased mobility of people and ideas, of advances in science, of global crisis, and of the unraveling of Empire. While cultural and intellectual exchanges between Asia and Europe can be traced back to the earliest days of Eurasian interactions, it is in the first half of the twentieth century that these interactions saw an unprecedented increase in translocal traffic and in the development of (and between) cosmopolitan subjects, resulting in new collocations of ideas and cultural influences. This volume moves beyond arresting these flows in a frame of impact and response. Rather, it brings together papers which focus on human agencies, interactions and hybridities. Collectively, the contributions to Eurasian Encounters investigate how the two ends of Eurasia interacted in artistic, academic, and religious spheres through new cosmopolitanisms that affected both Europe and Asia.

Dr Carolien Stolte is an assistant professor of History at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Dr Yoshiyuki Kikuchi is an associate professor of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai) in Hayama, Japan.