The 16^th November 2022 saw the opening of “The Community Imagination in Foreign Literature” and the 2022 Youth Academic Forum, hosted online and offline by SFL of ECNU. The forum invited experts in foreign literature to give keynote speeches and organized young scholars from SFL to exchange research results and engage in dialogue around the theme of the conference, aiming at promoting the construction of foreign literature discipline in SFL, promoting exchanges and cooperation among young scholars from different departments, and deepening the understanding of President Xi Jinping’s concept of “community of human destiny”. The forum, which took a combination of online and offline approaches, attracted over 200 scholars, teachers and students from across the country to participate in the conference, and sparked an enthusiastic response.

Professor Yuan Xiaoyi from SFL delivered the opening speech. She pointed out that a remarkable feature of SFL’s research team is the long-held literary enthusiasm. She hoped that through this forum, the literary research team could break the boundaries of language, as the theme of this forum “community” suggests, and develop their own research ideas in a free exchange.

The conference consisted of two parts: an expert keynote presentation and a youth academic forum. After a short opening ceremony, five renowned experts gave presentations on the topic of “community”. Afterwards, four young scholars from SFL reported their recent research results around this theme.

After each presentation, the participants both online and offline raised questions and ideas, and the interaction between the audience and the speakers was so enthusiastic as to inspire all the participants to further study the community imagination in foreign literature.