主讲人：Anthony Perron, Ph.D. （Department of History，Loyola Marymount University）

时间： 5月27日（周二）下午4:00-5:30

地点：文科楼505教室

摘要： This talk will draw on work I have done in teaching world history at the university level for several years. My particular area of interest in studying the global past has been comparative frontiers and borderlands in ancient and medieval Eurasia. As zones of exclusion and interaction, frontiers play a key role in the ideology of self-definition in premodern societies as well as in mediating cultural interaction. Of special interest are those borders that separated so-called “civilizations” (urbanized, agricultural, literate) from societies seen as “barbarian” (lacking cities and writing and dependent largely on pastoralism). Beyond a simple history of military confrontation, there is much to be studied here, including the ways in which civilizations depicted their barbarian others through ethnographic writing and the degree to which barbarian cultures adopted and rejected forms from the sphere of “civilization.” This lecture will focus on one chapter of this history of barbarian-civilized frontiers: the phenomenon of conquest dynasties, regimes of barbarian origin that come to rule within the sphere of civilization. It will look comparatively across both time and space, examining two conquest regimes from period of “late antiquity” (the Northern Wei dynasty in China and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy) and three from the period of the early Middle Ages (the Liao dynasty in China, the Seljuq Turks in the lands of the caliphate, and the Normans Europe). A central argument of the talk will be that barbarian regimes of late antiquity had a different relationship with the civilizations they encountered than did later conquest dynasties, a difference that can be linked to the types of frontiers we find in respectively the Han and Roman states, on the one hand, and the Tang, Abbasid, and Carolingian states, on the other. While the former were generally borders of exclusion, the latter were more cosmopolitan and open. In this lecture, I hope to make links between the way Chinese history has been conceptualized and how we might understand the broader history of the Eurasia in the premodern era.