<Upcoming Events>
May 2024 Workshop and fieldtrip to Vietnam:
By invitation only. A follow up to the May 2021 Water(s) Graduate Conference.
Sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative
<Past Events>
May 5-6, 2023 Invited Workshop:
Botanical Knowledge in Motion: Plant Geography and Epistemic Traditions in and across Asia, 1850-1945
Attendance by pre-arrangement only. For more information, please email inter.asia@yale.edu
Organized by: Marjan Wardaki (Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Council on Middle East Studies)
Location: 10 Sachem Street Room 101
Sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative
May 6-7, 2022 8:30-11:00 AM (EST)
The Art of the Borderland Across South and Southeast Asia
For more information, please click here.
Organized by: Akshaya Tankha (Postdoctoral Associate, Yale South Asian Studies Council)
Location: Online
Co-sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and South Asian Studies Council
April 15-16, 2022 Invited Workshop
Revisiting the Frontier: Colonial legacies and lived realities of Himalayan border-worlds
Location: 10 Sachem Street Room 105
Co-sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and South Asian Studies Council
For more information, please click here.
April 6, 2022 4:30-6:00 PM (EST)
Against the Odds in Asia, 1901-2021: Thoughts on the Activists, Autocrats, Exiles and Empires of Several Eras
Location: 34 Hillhouse Avenue, Luce Hall, Room 203
Speaker: Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom (UC Irvine)
Opening remarks by Professor Arne Westad (Yale International Security Studies)
Co-sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and International Security Studies
With the cooperation of the Council on East Asian Studies, Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and the South Asian Studies Council
January 24, 2022 12:00 PM
Professor Clare Harris (University of Oxford) and Professor Arkotong Longkumer (University of Edinburgh)
The Art of the Borderland across South and Southeast Asia: A public conversation with Arkotong Longkumer & Clare Harris
November 5, 2021 9:00 AM (EST)
Co-sponsored by the InterAsia Initiative and the South Asian Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, Yale University
Please click on title above for more details.
May 28-29, 2021: InterAsia Water(s)Graduate Conference
Waters, flowing, falling or contained as rain, river, tides and wells, have long shaped connections and disconnections across Asia. As they continue to make and remake lives in a world of climate change and economic development, the ‘InterAsia Water(s) Graduate Conference’ at Yale University brought together qualitative and humanistic approaches to the study of water in Asia.
April 12, 2021.
12:00PM: Professor Elizabeth Lambourn (South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, De Montfort University)
Sweet water on the sea route to China. Forgotten technologies of mobility in the Indian Ocean world.
March 29, 2021 5:30PM
Professor Manan Ahmed (History, Columbia University)
An Intellectual Geography of Hindustan
March 15, 2021 5:30PM
Professor Shankar Nair (Religious Studies, University of Virginia)
March 1, 2021 5:30PM
Professor Arash Khazeni (History, Pomona College)
The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia
Friday, November 20 and Saturday, November 21
YALE INTERASIA VIRTUAL TWO-DAY WORKSHOP
Itinerant People and Moving Objects Across Islamic Asia
Monday, November 30 5:30PM
YALE INTERASIA ONLINE LECTURE
Connecting People, Places, and Things: Itineraries of Chinese Porcelain in around the Arabian Peninsula
Professor Nancy Um (SUNY Binghamton)
Click on the lecture date above for more details.
Monday, November 2, 2020 5:30 PM
YALE INTERASIA ONLINE LECTURE
Advance registration required
“Where are you? Call out to me”: The All India Radio Urdu Service’s Letters of Longing
Professor Isabel Huacuja Alonso (CSU San Bernardino)
Please click on lecture date above for more details.
Monday, October 26, 2020 5:30 PM
YALE INTERASIA ONLINE LECTURE
Performing Waria: Genre as a Technology for Shaping Transgender Identity in Indonesia
Professor Paige Johnson (Columbia University)
Please click on lecture date above for more details.
Monday, February 3, 2020
YALE INTER-ASIA LECTURE:
Social Bonds and Service in Persianate Asia:
Love, Friendship, and the Problem of Hierarchy
Venue: 10 Sachem Street, Room 212
Professor Mana Kia
Associate Professor, MESAAS, Columbia University
Politically and social significant forms of companionship undergirded early modern Persianate societies across Central, South and West Asia, forms shared because they were interwoven with the broader transregional circulation of texts, people and ideas. Persianate polities cohered around hierarchically structured social bonds linking individuals and groups marked by dissimilar origins, religious affiliations, social locations, occupational groupings, and claims to power. Because of the way the political grew out of the social, in times of political devolution or collapse, social bonds could stabilize localities, maintain regional linkages and provide continuity and coherence in unstable times. This talk specifically explores the language and practices of social bonds, according to their broader and longer histories, in the midst of shifting political structures in 18th-century Hindustan, a site of transregional traffic. To realize and render these relations legible required the production and exchange of images, compositions, books, and objects, as well as particular bodily practices. Scrutinizing the ways hierarchical relations of service and patronage were spoken in terms of love and friendship calls into question analytic assumptions about the significance of freedom and consent in social relationships, as well as blurs historical distinctions between family and others. Beyond historicizing unhelpfully modern understandings of servitude and freedom, the individual and social difference, the understanding that many of our textual and material sources were products of bonded relations and their intimate practices suggests new ways of receiving and thinking with them.
September 13-14, 2019
YALE INTER-ASIA BOOK WRITING WORKSHOP
Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities II
This invitation-only workshop was to convene a select group of collaborators, who are based in North America, the United Kingdom, and in Asia, to synthesize the work we have done so far and to prepare the next publication in our series of books. This book will join our previous two volumes to further the interdisciplinary work of the Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia series. In this workshop, participants revisited their revised papers with the aim to finalize them for publication through a discussion to elicit their contributions to the ecologies of urbanism framework and their insight into the decay and regeneration of urban infrastructure and experience across Asia.
May 5, 2019
YALE INTER-ASIA WORKSHOP
Mediators at the Edges of Empire
This one-day workshop examined the role of mediators in the making and unmaking of power, be it political, economic, or environmental, in various borderlands across InterAsian spaces. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the conveners consider the role of intermediaries, border-crossers, go-betweens, and middlemen in the frictional zones between polities, where state authority begins to break down. We conceptualize these zones geographically between state territories, topographically between the lowlands of economic elites and the highlands of the political opposition, and epistemologically between knowledge systems. Through ethnographic and historical attention to the instruments of translation and bureaucratic mechanisms of flows, we hope to address the following questions: How do views from the edges of empire reorient our understanding of the center? How are terms between newcomers and natives, imperialists and indigenes navigated, negotiated, and ultimately compromised on the ground? What experimental configurations of power then emerge as a result? The conveners seek to build a comparative framework and common vocabulary in order to analyze how mediators facilitate, obstruct, and reinvent dynamics of connection and disconnection in these spaces. In doing so, they aim to trace some of the patterns in which empires are reconstituted and transformed at their edges.
September 21-23, 2018
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Wood Age in Asia: Connection and Comparison in Forest History
Organizers: Bradley Camp Davis, Brian Lander, John S. Lee, Ian M. Miller, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan
Please click WOOD AGE IN ASIA for more details.
Supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies Program on Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and additional funding from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund. With additional funding from CEAS, SASC and SEAS area studies Councils at the MacMillan Center, Agrarian Studies, and InterAsia Connections program, and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University.
This conference brought together scholars of South, Southeast, and East Asia for a discussion framed by the concept of a “wood age.” We will consider both the centrality of wood to material life in the premodern world and the changes brought by the industrialization of the forest. Using perspectives from social and cultural history; archeology and paleoecology; and the histories of art, architecture, science, and medicine, this conference addressed the wide range of ways that people interacted with woodlands. These dialogues will help move forest history beyond the early focus on deforestation while offering an environmental critique of Asian history and correcting the current Eurocentric bias of forest history.
Please click WOOD AGE IN ASIA for more details.
May 11, 2018 9:45 am to 6:00 pm
YALE INTER-ASIA WORKSHOP
Migratory Justice: Legal Diasporas, Political Violence and the Making of New Legal Orders in Asia and Africa
Organizer: Professor Rohit De
Panel I: Geographies of Law
Laurie Wood (Florida State University), “Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire”
Bhavani Raman (University of Toronto), “At Land’s End: Postwar Tamil Imaginaries across the Bay of Bengal, 1945-1970”
Misha Mink Roth (Johns Hopkins) “Indian Merchant Networks and Colonial Law in Central Kenya, 1914-1938”
Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia), Queen of the Sea”
Panel II: People of Law
Samuel Fury Childs Daly (Duke), “Martial Law on the Move: Nigerian and Ghanian Judges in East Africa in the 1970s”
Kalyani Ramnath (Princeton/Harvard), South Asia’s Other Partitions”
Rohit De (Yale), “Writing Legal Lives: Kenya, India, Malaysia”
Panel III: Deploying Law
Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University), “Playing the Nation Game: Reclaiming European Properties in Post-World War II China”
Elizabeth Thornberry (Johns Hopkins) “Law in Service of the State and Law Against the State in 20th Century South Africa”
Cindy Ewing “Arab-Asian Solidarity, Strategies of Constitutional Decolonization and the Former Italian Colonies, 1947-1953”
Friday, March 9, 2018 12:30 PM-5:00 PM
Graduate Student Planning Workshop
Connected Histories of Freedom in the Long 20th Century
Location: Department of Anthropology, 10 Sachem Room 105
Student Organizer: Zaib un Nisa Aziz and Charlotte Kiechel
This day long planning workshop seeked to examine the histories of emancipatory projects in the long 20th century; to lay the foundations of a future conference on the same theme.
Please click for CALL FOR PAPERS
November 3, 2017
Roundtable
Entanglements with Nature: Environmental Humanities in Asia
Friday, November 3, 2017 3:00 PM
Whitney Humanities Center Room 208
Panelists: Prasenjit Duara (History, Duke); Kathleen Morrison (Anthropology, UPenn); Karen Thornber (Comparative Literature, Harvard)
Moderator: Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Anthropology, Yale)
October 26, 2017
Invited plenary workshop
October 26, 2017 10:00 AM-2:oo PM
10 Sachem Street, Room 118
Organizer: Ian Miller
September 8, 2017
Lecture by award-winning visiting artist, Tiffany Chung
remapping history: the unwanted population
A lecture by Tiffany Chung
Friday, September 8, 2017 4:00 PM
Department of Anthropology
10 Sachem Street, Room 105
Tiffany Chung discussed her recent work, which engages with issues of migration, displacement, and spatial and socio-political transformation across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Hosted by the Yale Inter-Asia Connections Program
September 26, 2017 4:00-5:30 PM
Environmental Humanities in Asia Inaugural Event
Hidden in Plain Sight: Madagascar and the Indian Ocean World
Speaker: Professor Alison Richard (Franklin Murray Professor of Anthropology Emerita, Senior Research Scientist, Yale University)
Co-hosted by the Yale Inter-Asia Connections Program and Department of Anthropology at Yale, in coordination with the Yale Environmental Humanities Initiative
Yale InterAsia Connections Workshop and Photo Exhibit 2017
Photo Exhibit (April 10-May 30, 2017)
Anthropocene: Coastal Societies of the Bay of Bengal
Curator: Dr. Debojyoti Das (Postdoctoral Fellow)
In this series of beautiful pictures taken in the coastal belt of India and Bangladesh, Debojyoti Das organized an abstract, colorful journey to make you look at mundane, everyday item through the eyes of a dreamy child.
Invited Workshop
Connected 
Landscapes: The Alternative Understanding of Asian Societies, History and Ecology
Saturday, May 6, 2017 (8:30AM–4:30PM)
Convener: Debojyoti Das (Postdoctoral Fellow)
This workshop proposed to describe Asia as a dynamic and connected space through historical, geographical, economic, cultural, religious and more recently ecological formations stretching across West Asia through Eurasia, South Asia and Southeast to Far East Asia. The aim of the workshop was to explore how Asian societies have communicated and engaged with one another in their endeavor to create a connected socio-cultural and historical milieu.
InterAsia Civil-Military Relationship Workshop 2017
June 2, 2017 (9:00 AM-5:30 PM)
Invited Workshop: Friends, foes, or accomplices? Civil-military relations in spaces of surveillance across Asia
(Organizer: Sahana Gosh, PhD Candidate)
Yale InterAsia Connections Conference 2016
Friday, February 27, 2016
InterAsia Workshop: By Invitation Only
Less than a State, More than a Colony: Protectorates and Semicolonialisms in Comparison
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Convener: James Pickett (Postdoctoral Associate, Yale InterAsia)
This event devoted a single afternoon to the discussion of pre-circulated papers. Sections of the workshop focused on several thematically-related papers at a time, with scholars from the Yale community and other workshop participants commentating.
InterAsia Occasional Speaker Series: Discussion Forum
Between Anarchy and the Police State: Geopolitics and International Development in Central Asia
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 4:30-6:00 PM
Participants:
Thomas Barfield (Boston University) author of Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History
Eric McGlinchey (George Mason University) author of Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia
Jennifer Murtazashvili (University of Pittsburgh) author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan
Moderator:
Artemy Kalinovsky, author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
InterAsia Occasional Speaker Series: Jeffrey Sahadeo (Carleton University, Department of Political Science)
From (Cauc)Asians to Blacks: Racism and Postcolonialism in the Soviet Union and Russia in Comparative Perspective
Friday, December 10, 2015 4:30-6:00 PM
(Sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and the South Asian Studies Council)
InterAsia Occasional Speaker Series:
Sunil Amrith (Harvard University, Department of History)
South Asia’s Coastal Frontiers: Writing Inter-Asians Environmental History
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 4:30-6:00 PM
(Sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative)
Islam in Asia: Roundtable Discussion
Wednesday, May 13, 2015 3:30-5:00 PM
(Sponsored by the Yale InterAsia Initiative and the South Asian Studies Council)
This roundtable discussion brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars for a conversation about new research on Islam in Asia. The majority of the world’s Muslims live in Asia, but research and teaching on Islam often focuses more narrowly on the Middle East. The panel instead discusses approaches to Islam that emphasize its links to wider Asian contexts, extending from Central Asia, to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. By bringing together a group of scholars working on different regions and from varied disciplinary perspectives, the panel explored how Islamic practices have been entangled with wider trans-Asian circuits of mobility and exchange.
Participants: Fahad Bishara (Department of History, College of William and Mary), Rohit De (Department of History, Yale University), Narges Erami (Department of Anthropology, Yale University), Iza Hussin (Faculty of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University), and Julia Stephens (Department of History, Yale University)
Spring 2015 Symposium: Traveling Agents, Connecting Currents
April 17, 2015 1:00-7:00 PM
(Co-sponsored by the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, the South Asian Studies Council at Yale, and the Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies)
Participants: Krishnendu Ray (New York University) and Anand Yang (University of Washington). Also Dorian Carli-Jones and Melissa Lefkowitz (Directors of “China Remix).
Cities, Towns, and the Places of Nature: Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia
February 2015
A co-sponsored three-day book workshop and student presentation.
Organized by: Professor Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Yale University) and Professor Anne Rademacher (New York University).
Fall 2013 Video Screening and Lectures: Pan-Asian Pop!
Video Screening – November 7, 2013 8:00-9:00 PM 10 Sachem Street Room 105
Lecture – November 9, 2013 12:00-5:00 PM 10 Sachem Street Room 105
(Sponsored by the Yale Inter-Asia Initiative and the Council on East Asian Studies)
We will start with video screenings to kick off a series of lectures by Ashish Chadha (University of Rhode Island), Ian Condry (MIT), and Tiantian Zheng (SUNY Cortland), followed by a panel discussion.