A senior delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences visited the College in December.

Top Think Tank visits Exeter for Research Networking and Partnership Building

On Saturday 3rd December, the University of Exeter welcomed a senior delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The visit, led by the Vice-President of CASS Professor Jiang Zhang, met with a number of academics based in the Colleges of Humanities and Social Sciences and International Studies to discuss how Exeter might collaborate with CASS in the future.

CASS is a premier academic organisation in the fields of humanities, philosophy and social sciences, made up of 31 research institutes and 45 research centres. At present, CASS has more than 3,200 professional researchers who carry out research activities covering nearly 300 sub-disciplines concerned with humanities, social sciences and business. They are currently ranked 20th among the World Top 50 Think Tanks according to the Think Tank and Civil Societies Programme at the University of Pennsylvania.

During the visit, the CASS Delegation met with Humanities’ Associate Dean for International and Development, Jo Gill, to discuss parallels in Exeter and CASS’s research interests. This was followed by a roundtable discussion bringing together academics who work in the fields of contemporary literary theories, new thoughts and new movements regarding literature criticism, and comparative studies between Chinese and western literary theories. Exeter and CASS identified a number of areas where there might be potential to work together in future, and will now continue to explore these emerging links further.

Professor Jo Gill said of the visit; ‘I’m delighted that Exeter were able to host CASS during their visit to the UK. CASS are an extremely impressive organization with academic expertise across a variety of fields, so I’m pleased that we had this opportunity to discuss how we could work more closely in future. There is considerable overlap in our research expertise, so we hope that this visit will be the start of further collaborations between our institutions.’

Date: 22 December 2016

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