The University of Macau (UM) is going to hold its first “Department of History Forum I: Tracing Local and Global Cultures” from 15 April to 20 May 2009.

The Forum will last for six weeks and historians from UM will give talks on some aspects of local and global cultures, stemming for their individual research. The lectures will be held every Wednesday evening from 18:30 to19:30 at the University of Macau Library.

The first talk will be held on 15 April and hosted by Dr. Paul Van Dyke in English and Chinese. The topic of the talk will be “Flower Boats of the Pearl River Delta: Voices from the Past”. The second talk will be hosted by Dr. Rogério Miguel Puga in English with the topic “Ut Pictura Poesis: Macau and Timor in 1829 through the Drawings of Lucy Cleveland”. The third will be hosted by Professor Tang Kaijian in Chinese with the topic of “Salvaging Sunken European Ships in the South China Sea from the Reign of Emperor Wanli (ca. 1620): Problems Surrounding the Early Introduction of Portuguese Cannons”. The fourth will be hosted by Associate Professor Robert Antony in English and Chinese with the topic of “The Cult of the Earth God in Ancient China and the Earth God Shrines in Macau”. And the last talk of this Forum will be held on 20 May and hosted by Associate Professor George Wei in English and Chinese with the topic of “Modern Dance and Its Role in Constructing National Identity in Taiwan”.

For abstracts of the talks, please visit the webpage of the Department of History of UM: http://www.umac.mo/fsh/hist/.