A screening of an award-winning documentary following the expansion of a massive Chinese-built factory complex in rural Ethiopia. Followed by a conversation with the directors Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu.

Made in Ethiopia Film Sheds Light on Women, Work, and the Human Costs of Industrialization

   June 2025  Environmental Humanities Workshop       and field trip in Kathmandu “More Than Human”

This was a small workshop organized by Dr. Shalini Iyengar     and Dr. Gao Yufang, research affiliates of the InterAsia             Initiative. A group of students and scholars spent several         days visiting sites, presenting papers, and discussing issues     on environmental humanities and explores the                           under examined roles of more-than-human entities—such       as animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and other natural           elements—as co-constitutive agents in shaping InterAsia           beyond national and disciplinary boundaries.

May 2024  Water Workshop and field trip in Vietnam

This was a small workshop organized as a follow up to the May 2021 InterAsia Water(s) Graduate Conference. A group of students and scholars from Yale University, Hong Kong University, and Sun Yat-sen University held a workshop in Vietnam to exchange ideas with colleagues in Vietnam regarding water in an InterAsia context. This was supplemented by a field trip of the Mekong Delta.

Please click here for more information and photos from our workshop and field trip.

Please click here for information on our 2021 conference.

Recently Published Books

An edited book by the InterAsia Initiative’s Professor K. Sivaramakrishnan and Professor Anne Rademacher (NYU), Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities, published by Hong Kong University Press, is now available at https://hkupress.hku.hk/pro/1835.php.

(From the press release)
Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors to this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship.

An English to Hindi translation of Kakuzo Okakura’s famed The Book of Tea, by one of our PhD candidates, Lav Kanoi. His translation is graced by a preface from the noted scholar, Philip Lutgendorf.

Please click here for more details.

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Yale InterAsia Initiative

The InterAsia Initiative is a collaborative multi-institutional group that aims to shift paradigms of how Asia is conceptualized by promoting collaborative research, scholarly networking, and public policy connections.

The InterAsia Initiative is an effort between Yale and six other universities and think tanks around the world, established to create a new paradigm that takes Asia as an interlinked set of formations stretching from the East and Southeast Asia, to South Asia, Eurasia and the Middle East. Pushing inquiries beyond nation-states, land-based demarcations, imperial zones, and cultural boundaries, the Initiative promotes research and conversations that address transregional connections. For critical moments of interaction, we include historical and contemporary periods.

Principal Investigators at Yale University

Professor Helen Siu (Department of Anthropology, MacMillan Center)

“We are working to reveal and depict Asia as an interlinked set of formations stretching from the Middle East through Eurasia, Central Asia, and South Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia.” This approach, she notes, necessitates deep collaboration among social scientists and humanists. (http://news.yale.edu/2013/04/18/carnegie-grant-helps-build-trans-regional-network-research-asia)

Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Department of Anthropology, MacMillan Center)

“The InterAsia Initiative will highlight the shifting regional dynamics by mapping the changing shape of emerging sub-regions, as well as the emergence of new narratives on ‘who defines Asia through time’.”  (http://news.yale.edu/2013/04/18/carnegie-grant-helps-build-trans-regional-network-research-asia)

In addition to Yale University, the main members of the InterAsia Initiative include the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong,  the Global and Transregional Studies Platform at Göttingen University (Germany), Seoul National University Asia Center and Duke University Global Asia Initiative.

With renewed support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York from Fall 2015, we have been continuing to foster a young generation of researchers that will continue to find new and creative ways to carry out InterAsia research and teaching.