Description
Port cities “are distinctive cities. They are doorways or conduits, connecting continents. People and things settle, mingle, and accumulate in them…. Port city environments embrace many subjects of academic study at many levels of spatial and temporal scale, including urbanism, empire, nationality, networks, regions, histories, ecologies, societies, arts, and technology, all woven together by interactions of mobility and territoriality.” These words introduce New York University’s proposal for Port City Environments in Global Asia , a multi-sited, multi-disciplinary project to examine Asia in global perspective through the lens of port cities. Our grant would be used to help forge connections between faculty based at the NYU campuses in New York, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, themselves port cities.
Grant funds would support activities including colloquia, symposia, seminars and lectures on the individual campuses as well as cross-campus interaction, all aimed at fostering collaborations in research and teaching. Several themes around shared interests have already been developed by clusters of faculty. These include Imperial Connections, which will examine ports and trade networks in empires, from ancient times to the present; Mobile Cultural Forms, focused on topics including religion, art, science, food and medicine; and Routes of Mobility, which will look at how links between Asia and the rest of the world have come about, from sailing on the monsoon winds to surfing the Internet. Each theme would be the focus of an annual conference, to be rotated among, and with faculty participation from, the three campuses. The organizers, Tansen Sen, who studies the history of interchange between China and India, and David Ludden, a specialist on the history of South Asia, anticipate that new faculty clusters and themes will emerge as the project develops.
The project encompasses faculty- and course-development workshops to set the stage for an eventual cross-campus Global Asia curriculum and a Global Asian Studies major. Other workshops would focus on collaborative teaching and graduate training. In addition to new course content and cross-field collaborations, the project leaders plan to publish a collection of articles on port city environments for the Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press), for which Ludden serves as editor-in-chief.
Scholars at NYU were at the center of an earlier critique of area studies, including Asian studies, as a product of Cold War thinking that divided the world into artificial regions for study to meet national security needs. The proposal writers join voices arguing that globalization has changed the dynamic by opening intellectual space for questioning conventional borders. “Fixed territorial boundaries of national states no longer suffice to organize knowledge, in any field, as rapidly expanding mobility challenges territorial control over all kinds of human activity, including, of course, thought.” Port City Environments in Global Asia is one attempt to stitch Asia back together, joining Far East to Near East, Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, and so on, and to breathe new life into Asian studies at NYU by experimenting with an intellectual, transnational framework for multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $450,000 to New York University to support the Port City Environments in Global Asia project.
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2018
