Zhejiang University Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, permanently located in Zhijiang Campus, inaugurated on the morning of August 1. As the “special academic zone” of Zhejiang University, the Institute will recruit well-known scholars or new academic professionals in humanities and social sciences at home and abroad and will support them to do theoretical, fundamental and exploratory researches so as to innovate ideas, form theories and breed humanistic studies.

Wu Zhaohui, President of Zhejiang University present at the inaugural ceremony, unveiled the plaque forthe Institute. He said the Institute was a milestone in liberal arts construction of Zhejiang University, and also a landmark project to further improve the discipline system of Zhejiang University. He hoped that Institute would serve both as a high-end platform and a national academic exchange platform for global Chinese scholars. “Since the Institute is located in Hangzhou, it should epitomize Hangzhou characteristics. Its development should reflect the fusion of humanities and nature, of humanities and technology and show tastes and leisurely pace of Hangzhou. The Institute should be an academic-oriented and academic-leading special zone.”

Luo Weidong, Vice President of Zhejiang University, and Zhao Dingxin, scholar of “Recruitment Program of Global Experts” and professor of University of Chicago will be the deans of the Institute. They said that different from institutes of humanities and social sciences in China, the Institute, as an independent academic research place, will provide adequate funding, freedom, and quiet and comfortable environment for scholars to concentrate on studies free of interferences and to conduct genuine interdisciplinary exchanges with scholars from different disciplines and cultures.

It is said that the Visiting Scholar Program of the Institute will invite budding and promising scholars to conduct academic researches each year. The first 22 visiting scholars from 16 universities at home and abroad, e.g. Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, Nanjing University, National Taiwan University, Fu Jen Catholic University and University of Florida, have settled down in Zhijiang Campus for researches and held 20 academic exchange activities regularly.