Speakers: Yin Cao, History, Tsinghua University, Beijing

Ying Cheng, Asian and African Languages and Cultures, Peking University, Beijing

Barbara Watson Andaya, Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Charles A. Laughlin, East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Virginia

Moderator: Ming-Bao Yue, Director, Center for Chinese Studies, UHM 

The area studies model was a particular US invention during the Cold War, and ever since Bruce Cumming’s seminal essay "Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War" [1997], there have been academic debates in the US on the “uses and abuses” of this model and its implication for cross-cultural knowledge production. As early as 2017, a document issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education had inaugurated a new phase for the discipline, and by 2018, more than 400 research centers had been established at top Chinese universities dedicated to various regions of strategic importance, including Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, etc. Bringing together prominent area studies scholars from China and the US, this interdisciplinary faculty roundtable aims to explore the future promise as well as lessons of the area studies model in China and the US.

Co-sponsors: UHM Department of Asian Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

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