The planning for this book was initiated by Jing Hao in 2020. Jing had recently taken up a position at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, following on from her doctoral training in Sydney under Jim Martin’s supervision and a post-doctoral position in Hong Kong. Back in 2015 after finishing her PhD project on ideational meaning in scientific discourse, Jing worked with Jim as a research assistant studying history teaching in Australian secondary school classrooms – as part of the PEAK project funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (DP130100481). Later, as part of her research project in Chile – funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT 3190498) – Jing began work on historical discourse in Mandarin Chinese.
Accordingly, Jing and Jim decided to co-edit this volume and drew together an exciting range of authors specialising in English, Spanish and Chinese – some very experienced in the analysis of history discourse and others bringing new voices into the field. We are grateful to our authors for their forbearance and tenacity as they drafted and redrafted chapters during Covid times. Understandably, we weren’t able to get together face-to-face to share ideas, but through Zoom meetings and cycles of careful editing, we managed, we feel, to make up for the missing seminars and conferencing. We look forward to us all getting together again to celebrate this collection before too long.
