Rebecca Nedostup

Since my time at IIAS in the spring of 2023, I have not stopped singing its praises to students, staff, faculty, and administrators. IIAS to me represents interdisciplinarity, collegiality, and area studies done right. It brings together researchers of high levels of expertise, but it understands expertise in a broad and inclusive sense. It takes the meaning of “international” seriously, serving as a node of interaction and collaboration among scholars, practitioners, and community members based in Africa and Latin America as well as in Asia, Europe, and the United States. It recognizes the knowledge of community organizers, artists, and civil servants as well as academics, exemplified brilliantly in such longstanding and successful programs as Humanities across Borders and the River Cities Network. 

Personally, I have found it to be the most congenial, surprising, and inspiring intellectual home I have experienced in my career. While at the IIAS as Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at IIAS and Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), I was able to share my ongoing research on wartime displacement and develop a new project on the material legacies of Taiwan’s martial law era, benefiting from the knowledge of Dutch and international experts on historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and collective memory. I was also able to stretch my wings by discussing the connection of politics to performance art, and learning from visiting fellows about topics ranging from Islamic political thought in Indonesia to the role of movement and memory in the work of Italo Calvino. A fellows’ outing – courtesy of the River Cities project – to a rewilding project in Rotterdam still plays an important role in my teaching on space and place, and in my own thinking about material and environmental legacies. My PhD students in History at Brown University have also benefitted from the Institute’s breadth of vision and organization, whether in field seminars or as short-term visitors wholly welcomed into the IIAS community. 

Finally, for me as Asian studies researcher based in the US, the IIAS plays an outstanding role as a global leader of the field. The ICAS conference is one of the few opportunities Asian studies scholars and students from all parts of the world, in multiple disciplines, and studying multiple areas have to interact as a group. I often assign IIAS Newsletter articles in my classes, since they introduce high-level research in an accessible way. Following my time as Taiwan Chair I have been part of the IIAS fellowship committee (and now serve as chair), a process that exposes me to cutting edge research being carried out around the world and allows me to collaborate with colleagues based globally in ways that I have not had the chance to experience in working with US-based fellowship competitions. My intellectual and professional life has been immensely enriched by the IIAS, and I cannot imagine the progress of my field without it.