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Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

HEYTA 2021

Higher Education Young Talent Alliance (HEYTA) Summit 2021

Led by Tsinghua University, Sept 2021

The Higher Education Young Talent Alliance (HEYTA) was launched in 2018 to expand humanities-related discussion between the China and UK student communities. It has successfully been held twice by students from Tsinghua University (offline) and University of Exeter (online) in the past two years.

In 2021, the Association of Student International Communication at Tsinghua University worked together with student volunteers at University of Exeter to hold the HEYTA 2021 Online Summit from 6th to 9th September. More than 100 students from universities in China and the UK registered for the event, with participation totalling 454 over 4 days.

HEYTA 2021 focused on three themes:

  1. Digital humanities
  2. Studies of Eastern and Western Plays
  3. Comparative Literature

Guest speakers covered topics such as ‘Image and Visual Knowledge Production in Digital Heritage’,’ Translating Classical Chinese Plays into English with a Shakespearean Flavor’, ‘Shakespeare's Drama and Western Christianity: A Case Study of The Tempest’, and ‘Battling Against Environmental Crisis: Children in Action’, in the first three days. Student participants had the opportunity to present their thoughts on the last day of the event. 

Prof PENG Gang (Vice president of Tsinghua University), Prof YAN Haiping (Secretariate General of the UK-China Humanities Alliance in Higher Education (UKCHA) and Dean of Tsinghua's Institute for World Literatures and Cultures), and Prof Melissa Percival (Deputy Secretariate General of UKCHA and Associate Dean for Global of College of Humanities, University of Exeter) spoke at the opening ceremony. HEYTA 2021 is the second student UKCHA event that students from Tsinghua and Exeter have co-organized. The University of Exeter became the UK lead of UKCHA in 2020, and has hosted several major events, including the UKCHA Annual Academic Conference in May.

Download the HEYTA Summit 2021 agenda