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The “InterAsia Initiative”, to be managed by the MacMillan Center at Yale and the Social Science Research Council, has a number of core goals including the creation of a comprehensive, searchable database of scholars working in the field.

Further plans include a project website for disseminating research and networking materials, particularly to US policymakers, and a major international conference designed to cement existing academic networks and bring in new scholars.

The initiative “aims to shift paradigms in how we conceptualise Asia by promoting collaborative research, scholarly networking and public policy connections,” says Helen Siu, professor of anthropology at Yale, and will inevitably draw on the expertise of researchers in both the social sciences and humanities.

“The InterAsia Initiative will highlight the shifting regional dynamics,” adds her fellow principal investigator Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan - Dinakar Singh professor of India and South Asian studies at Yale – “by mapping the changing shape of emerging sub-regions, as well as the emergence of new narratives on ‘who defines Asia through time’.”

Yale’s partners in the InterAsia Initiative are: the SSRC; the National University of Singapore; the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong; Göttingen University (Germany); the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (Lebanon): and Koç University (Turkey).

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com