Chia Ning, professor of history at Central College, has been selected to participate in the three-week National Endowment for the Humanities 2022 Summer Institute, “Worlds in Collision: Nahua and Spanish Pictorial Histories and Annuals in 16th-Century Mexico.”
Chia Ning’s role in the summer institute will be bridging Eurasian studies with Mesoamerican studies by initiating a global tribute study. She will compare the tribute system in Chinese history – a China-centered relationship with outsiders through ritualized ceremony and gift exchange – by bringing together scholars from Chinese, Mongolian, Eurasian and Mesoamerican studies. In many parts of the world, including the Mesoamerican societies, a similar type of tribute system existed in the human past. This will contribute to the development of world history.
Chia Ning is one of 26 college and university faculty from across the country participating in the Institute at Adelphi University in New York from June 9 to 30. These scholars will immerse themselves in source materials to give expression to the new existential realities created by the Spanish incursions into the Valley of Mexico in 1519-1521, the overthrow of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the founding of Spanish colonial Mexico City.
