17-19 June, 2015
While we tend to think of traditional cosmological understanding as unique to each civilization and modern astronomical knowledge as the result of a singular quest for the scientific truth, ideas in fact traverse different traditions and transform across space and time. Disparate and often conflicting worldviews of the nature of our universe, whether traditional versus modern knowledge, or knowledge from different traditions, co-exist within most cultures. At this international interdisciplinary workshop, scholars of various fields in both humanities and science will join together to explore how our understandings of the cosmos evolve and overlap across time and space, with a wide array of interrelated topics from cosmology, astronomy, astrology, time-calculation to modern space science. With particular focus on Asia – a region whose long scientific tradition has been understudied compared to that of its Western counterpart – the participants will discuss how astral knowledge has been communicated, adopted, and transformed as they cross linguistic and cultural borders, past and present.