Shanghai and Berlin: Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany

FAIN: FS-50244-10

Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)
Russell Berman (Project Director: March 2010 to April 2012)
Ban Wang (Co Project Director: March 2010 to April 2012)

A six-week college and university teacher seminar at Stanford University for sixteen participants to explore urban modernism in Shanghai and Berlin in the period between the First and Second World Wars.

This seminar investigates distinct forms of urban modernism in two key metropoles, Shanghai and Berlin, taken as symptomatic sites of innovation. The seminar "Shanghai and Berlin" is about urban modernism in literature and film, alternative paths to modernization in China and Germany, and the anxieties modernization has elicited. Conventional approaches to modernism have addressed it primarily within the framework of national literary histories or, at best, as a pan-European or western phenomenon. A goal of the seminar is to foster a comparative approach in scholarly investigations of modernism in the era of globalization.