15past15 is a new podcast which discusses how the past is made, and by whom. Its first season focuses on history and history-writing in East Asia, from the sixteenth century to today. Interviewees debate the indigenous historical traditions of China and Japan in particular, and the ways that understandings of the past evolved at times of acute political and societal change. The podcast’s contributors teach East Asian and global history at leading universities in Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, the USA and Canada. The interviews have been released weekly since 15 January 2019.
In episode 2, "Confucius's Comeback", Joachim Kurtz, the HCTS professor for Intellectual History, discusses the changing ways in which Confucius has been understood in the last five hundred years. Other episodes to be released feature current former and HCTS and Cluster members, such as David Mervart ("Translating the Republic of Letters"), Lorenzo Andolfatto ("Chinese Utopias"), Pablo Blitstein ("Whose Renaissance?"), Martin Dusinberre ("Japan and the Pacific Age"), and Barbara Mittler ("China’s Renaissance").
The podcast "15past15" is hosted by the University of Zurich’s Digital History Lab and its production was supervised by former Cluster member Prof. Martin Dusinberre. It was made possible by a Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) grant for the collaborating project "East Asian Uses of the Past: Tracing Braided Chronotypes."
"East Asian Uses of the Past" is located in Heidelberg at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, in Madrid, London and Zurich. The group of researchers, headed by HCTS professor Joachim Kurtz, is interested in global co-productions of historical knowledge. Zooming in on interactions in and between Europe and East Asia since 1600, they explore changing perceptions and conceptualizations of time and temporality.