Introduction of School of History/Institute for Global History

Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) is one of China’s leading universities under the direct administration of the Ministry of Education (MOE). It is listed under Project 211, Project 985’s Innovation Platform and the first round of the Double First-Class Project of China. Today, BFSU teaches 101 foreign languages. Capitalizing its distinctive foreign language strengths, BFSU established the World History Teaching and Research Office as early as 1960 to conduct teaching and research in world history. In 2014, BFSU founded the Institute of Global History. Building on this foundation, the School of History was established in 2017. Later, five research centers were established, including the Center for Knowledge Transfer and Study Abroad History, Conceptual History Research Center, Chinese History Research Center, Buddhist Cultural History Research Center, and Modern East-West Language and Cultural Contact Research Center. The School primarily focuses on the historical processes of the world and China since the Age of Discovery, and is committed to exploring how civilizations, as interdependent entities, have driven the progress of world history through their interaction, and to understanding the patterns of interaction and symbiosis between China and other civilizations from the perspective of the history of civilizations.

The School has three teaching and research sections for world history, Chinese history, and Sino-foreign relations history. The World History Research Division focuses on the historical examination of the economic, social, political, and cultural developments across various regions, nations, and ethnic groups. The Chinese History Research Division emphasizes the exploration of the historical origins and evolution of Chinese civilization. The Sino-Foreign Relations History Research Division adopts a global historical perspective to conduct holistic studies that integrate Chinese history with the histories of diverse global civilizations. Through the lens of global history, this division investigates the historical interactions among multiple civilizations, emphasizing their interconnectedness within a worldwide framework.

As a teaching and research institution, the School of History at BFSU is able to offer compulsory courses such as general history and theories of historiography, as well as a wide variety of elective courses with a certain degree of research depth, and at the same time, it is also responsible for the general education courses of the whole university. In addition to teaching, the members of the teaching and research team of the School of History have made considerable achievements in their respective professional research fields.

The School of History currently offers two undergraduate majors ‘World History’ and ‘Foreign Language+Foreign History’, a degree programme in World History, and a doctoral programme in Global History and Chinese Studies under the Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies sub-discipline of the first-level discipline of Foreign Languages and Literatures. The School of History has a complete student training system at the undergraduate, Master’s degree and doctoral levels. It features “historical research from a global perspective”and has created a curriculum system, research team and discipline development path with “a reasonable structure, effective connections and mutual promotion”in its three disciplinary directions of Chinese history, world history and specialised history. Of the three disciplinary directions, Chinese history emphasises “solid basic training in history”, world history emphasises “specialised research on regional and national history” and specialised.

In terms of international education, the School of History focuses on “local internationalization” and “global participation”. It actively introduces high-quality international educational resources, participates in the opening up of education, and enhances the internationalization of talent cultivation and academic research, building a faculty team with an international perspective. The School of History employs foreign experts to actively participate in the construction and development of our disciplines and majors. These experts come from the United States, Germany, Austria, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and other countries and regions, including some of the world’s top-known scholars and academic leaders. They conduct thematic academic lectures at our university, hold academic workshops at our school, participate in conferences held by our school, teach and enlighten our students, cooperate internationally with our school, and jointly publish academic achievements. In addition, the School of History places great emphasis on building an international talent training platform. It has established good cooperation with nearly 10 well-known universities abroad, mainly including teacher-student exchange, joint training, joint scientific research, and short-term study abroad programs. Among them, the “Eurasia Doctoral Students Forum”, held annually, is co-organized by our school with the University of Bonn and Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany, the University of Rome in Italy, the University of Vienna in Austria, Kansai University in Japan, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea, and other six world-renowned universities.

ADDRESS：No.2 North Xisanhuan Road, Beijing, P.R. China

邮箱：gh@bfsu.edu.cn

EMAIL：gh@bfsu.edu.cn

邮编：100089 Supported by BFSU ITC

ZIPCODE：100089 Supported by BFSU ITC