The second workshop of the Global History Collaborative was held on June 14 (Sat) and June 15 (Sun). Prof. Haneda Masahi began by providing an overview of the project. He stated that the project’s objectives were to conduct and build research through international networking on new world history or global history. He also explained the project’s plans. These include publishing collaborative research and joint research achievements in English, operating summer schools which are to be held on an annual rotation basis at the project’s member institutions (Princeton University (US), the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (France), and Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany)), and running an open applications program to encourage young post-graduate and post-doctorate students to apply to member institutions so that they can continue with their research. As of now, one researcher has been accepted at the US institution in October this year and another researcher has been accepted at the French institution for February 2015. An international workshop is now being planned and will be held in Germany in December. In addition, the program’s website is currently scheduled to be up and running by this summer.

In his closing remarks, Prof. Haneda shared his experiences as a researcher. He first started as a scholar in Persian History. He then went on to Urban History and the History of Architecture with a particular interest in how people relate and communicate with each other. He next became interested in travel writing studies. In the process of immersing himself in various fields, he has come to realize that it is necessary to study the past from a wider perspective and question the current framework of research on history. It is now important to have debates with international researchers as to why we need to examine the new horizon of sekaishi (world history or global history) in Japanese and see how this differs from or is similar to the Global History studied in English.

Following Prof. Haneda’s introduction, 15 researchers, who will be at the core of this project, introduced themselves and their research interests. In addition, they briefly introduced the background to their research and described how they had come to study Global History.

To sum up, in this workshop, Japanese researchers were able to share common ground through their discovery of what had led each of them to Global History, and this served as an excellent preparation for the upcoming kick-off meeting entitled “Is Global History Truly Global? The Positionality of Historians,” which is due to be held in Berlin in December.