About Us
Thinking across disciplines and regions, Global Asias is an institutional network of Asia and diaspora scholars at Rutgers: Asian Studies, History, English, American Studies, Geography, Environmental and Biological Sciences, Music, Spanish and Portuguese, Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Religion. Home to two-thirds of the world population, Asia sits at the center of key twenty-first century challenges, ranging from trade wars to nuclear proliferation, refugee crises to environmental disasters. While the growing policy and academic emphasis on global processes and transnational relations challenges a traditional area studies model of scholarship, recent trends show nationalism and regionalism to be on the rise, due in part to globalization itself. Global Asias rethinks the status of “Asia” as a world region and the methodological and theoretical frameworks that tie together various faculty members’ and emerging scholars’ interventions, including intra-Asian migration, Indian Ocean studies, inter-imperial encounters, and Asian diasporic formations. Global Asias explores intersecting research interests and strategizes ways to build points of commonality across our various regional specializations and disciplinary approaches to the study of East, South, and Southeast Asia as well as Asia in Europe and the Americas. Global Asias creates institutional space for interdisciplinary and transregional Asia scholars by convening regularly to coordinate lectures and activities, plan curricular directions, organize seminars and speakers around global Asian studies.
