The venue

The conference will be held in the main building of the University of Latvia, Raina bulvaris 19, Riga, LV 1586.

Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the largest city in the Baltics. Academic institutions of Chinese Studies are new in the whole area. During the past almost two decades small departments and research centres where founded in Riga, Tallinn, Tartu (both Estonia), Vilnius and Kaunas (both Lithuania). In the meantime, many of the first pioneering generations of sinologists who graduated with a traditional M.A. in the 1990ies have returned as PhDs from universities in Europe, China, Taiwan or the US, and during the past 4 years Chinese Studies underwent a progressive development.

Interdiscliplinary problems, especially cooperation with Japanology and other East Asian Studies and the application of contemporary theory to link the traditional fields of cultural studies with more recent methods of investigation play a key role.

Thanks to a close cooperation with institutions in Taiwan, Mainland China and Europe the research infrastructure increases step by step and international conferences and workshops regularly take place each year and are thematically coordinated by a network of all Baltic centres (“Baltic Alliance of Asian Studies”).

The absence of any local academic tradition in the field is compensated by an astonishing popularity of our BA, MA and PhD programmes. In Riga alone an average of 70 students enroll in the B.A. programme each year, the numbers in the larger centres in Tallinn and Vilnius being only insignificantly lower.

The 18^th EACS conference will be hosted by a team of sinologists from Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn, supported by enthusiastic students from all the three baltic countries. Interested participants will not only enjoy the charm of Europe’s north-eastern art-nouveau-metropole. They will also find many opportunities to meet with their colleagues from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, to learn more about how sinology is established in a new environment and, at the best, to give their support in the future to one or another activity within this process.

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