Rethinking Asian Studies in a Global Context

A three-year IIAS pilotprogramme (2014 -2016) supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York).

IIAS recently received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,New York, for a three-year pilot programme aimed at strengthening and redirecting Asian Studies as part of the foundation’s efforts to reframe area studies in Western universities. The programme is built on a practice of a close interaction between Asian, European and American partners.

It aims to foster new humanities-focused research and educational opportunities in the field of Asian Studies on the basis of a trans-regional interdisciplinary platform.
In the process, the programme seeks to shape academic communities around new themes of research, emphasising the inclusion of young and aspiring scholars from the three world-regions, and beyond.

Scope
The programme is incorporated in the overall research strategy of IIAS, which focuses on three thematic clusters Asian Heritages and Global Asia. The pilot initiative will include a range of scholarly activities in five topical areas, or ‘forums’, that cut across regions and disciplines:

Forum 1: ‘History and Asian Intellectual Traditions: Modal Epistemology and Theory for AmEurAsia’ (META)

Forum 2: ‘Uses of Culture and Cultural Heritage in Asian Contexts’

Forum 3: ‘Asian Spatialities’

Forum 4: ‘The Idea of the City in Asian Contexts’

Forum 5: ‘Views of Asia from Africa'

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