This panel explores how historical knowledge is made legible across borders, media, and forms of evidence. Bringing together case studies from China, Cyprus, India, and the Netherlands, it asks how historians can work beyond conventional archives through embodied performance, public discourse, and visual comparison. In this sense, “Voices from abroad” is not simply a label for researchers working in different places, but a way of thinking about how movement, distance, and translocal perspective generate new historical questions and methods.
Ming Yang’s “Future-Proofing Performance Heritage: Kunqu as a Test Case for the ‘Future of History’” examines Chinese Kunqu theatre, inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, as a case study for how performance history can remain durable when its evidence is embodied, ephemeral, and only partially recoverable through text. Savvas Skoufaridis’s “Past into Present: The Interplay of Nationalism and Colonialism in Cypriot Public Discourse on Male Sexuality” analyzes public discourse on male sexuality in Cyprus under late colonial and early postcolonial conditions, tracing how nationalism and colonialism shaped notions of sexual normality and deviance. Dhanasekar Prabakaran’s “From the Goddess with Mangoes to the Goddess with Apples: Cross-Cultural History and Visual Encounters” reflects on cross-cultural encounters with local goddesses in South India and the Netherlands, using visual practice and comparative symbolism to ask how migration and new cultural landscapes reshape historical inquiry.
Together, they suggest that the future of historical practice lies in recovering the past and expanding the forms, publics, and methods through which the past becomes meaningful in the present.