The Queen's College Record 2020

Reports and College Activities
Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, founded in 976 for the study of metaphysics
C. International conferences
The Centre held three international conferences in the academic year 2018-19.
Conference activities in 2019-20 were naturally quieter. The activities of the previous
year are now being worked up into peer-reviewed journal issues. The Centre
organised a three-day international conference on ‘The Materiality of Knowledge in
Chinese Thought, Past and Present’ (3-6 September 2019), held at Yuelu Academy,
Hunan University, Changsha, one of the four ancient universities in China. Accepting
that knowledge is shaped, sustained, and framed by socio-material factors, the
conference explored ways in which materiality has affected, and will continue to affect,
the perception, processing, and production of knowledge in China. To disrupt the
usual reflex of seeing the world through a western-specific lens, the conference was
conceived as the first of two events: the first conceptualised the field on the materiality
of knowledge in China, while the second will reach out into cross- and inter-disciplinary
research with an inter-cultural focus: www.materialityofknowledge.org.
D. The Journal Manuscript and Text Cultures
Work on Manuscript and Text Cultures continues apace. The journal will appear once
a year digitally and in print on demand in themed issues. It is double-blind peerreviewed.
With the journal we follow a strict open-access policy.
The first journal issue, ‘Transposition and Monumentality of Writing in Pre-modern
Epigraphic and Manuscript Traditions’ has now been fully peer-reviewed, and we are
currently getting the infrastructure in place for the Open Access online platform and
print-on-demand.
58 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020