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Home to two-thirds of the world population, Asia sits at the center of key twenty-first century challenges, ranging from trade wars to nuclear proliferation, refugee crises to environmental disasters.  While the growing policy and academic emphasis on global processes and transnational relations challenges a traditional area studies model of scholarship, recent trends show nationalism and regionalism to be on the rise, due in part to globalization itself.

Rutgers is home to a wide diversity of scholars actively engaging in research on Asia and its diasporas. Thus, we are uniquely positioned to take a leading role in reshaping conversations on the region. Our ongoing goals in this initiative are to transform Rutgers into a hub of expertise on Asia and its diasporic and hemispheric locales by leveraging existing faculty expertise across a wide range of academic disciplines and programs. By integrating existing faculty collaborations and forging new ones, we seek to move beyond traditional, Cold War area studies models by reframing regional and trans-regional conversations and by fostering new ways of thinking through area studies in an era of unprecedented crises, globalization and nationalism.