Bryna Goodman

My time at the International Institute for Asian Studies was just three months, too short, but for this U.S.-based China scholar, IIAS offered an intellectual breath of fresh air. I was drawn to the IIAS both for its research environment and for its a distinctively interdisciplinary and global approach to Asia. It proved a captivating encounter.

As a historian of modern China, my field has been powerfully shaped by the large arenas for China-studies in the People’s Republic of China and the US-based Association for Asian Studies, China- and US-centered, respectively. IIAS offers an eye-opening alternative, a European space for diversity and dialogue that inquires into a broader Asia (and a broader community of Asianists) in the world. Discussions bridge an expansive and connected Asia and feature scholars of diverse origins, including voices from Latin America and Africa. Such attention to conversations within and across the global south is crucial for understanding both historical and contemporary global Asia. 

An early IIAS seminar on China’s Belt and Road Initiative during my stay, for example, showcased the audience as much as the speaker in the discussion that followed, in which scholars from different world areas drew attention to manifold, unanticipated, and less China-centered elements of arrangements on the ground in numerous locations across the global south. This was for me an effective introduction to the wide-ranging dialogues that could be sparked by IIAS community events. It is in this respect that IIAS has developed an innovative scholarly architecture that can address Asia’s new global configurations, which are of course the new global configurations of our shared world. This type of evolving scholarly architecture, which brings together area studies and global studies is also somewhat rare and difficult to achieve in practice. It stands as a unique feature and commitment of IIAS that is realized in innovative collaborative adventures, in multiple sites in Europe, across Asia, and most recently in examining Africa-Asia relations as a new “axis of knowledge.” The recent conference in Dakar in June 2025 demonstrates the  thematic agility, global timeliness, and adaptability of IIAS as a distinctive hub for understanding the global reorientations of the contemporary world. 

At a moment when US scholarship in the humanities and social sciences faces both economic and political constraints, the IIAS, showing distinctive and visionary leadership, has been building important links of knowledge and mutual understanding, building connection with institutions in Asia, Africa, and other world regions, and supporting fellows from Asia and elsewhere. Though initially drawn to IIAS by my own research needs, I was glad for the sociability of shared office-space, and found that my work was enhanced as much by the moments when I attended unforeseen but not unrelated IIAS events that opened my mind to comparative issues and inquiries. 

Bryna Goodman