Rethinking Area Studies Through the Modern Asian Novel

FAIN: EH-250823-16

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1015)
Donald S. Lopez (Project Director: February 2016 to June 2022)

A four-week college and university institute for thirty participants, on understanding Asia through the reading of Asian novels, to be held at the University of Michigan.

The institute will trace the history of the Humanities’ role in Asian Studies in the past and offer new perspectives for the critical and comparative study of Asia in the future. What role can the Humanities play in advancing new models for understanding Asia? What critical resources can the Humanities of the new millennium marshal toward this endeavor, beyond those offered by philology and the social sciences? The participants of the institute will consider these questions and seek answers to them through a critical reexamination of the history of Asian Studies in the American academy over the twentieth century, through its evolution from Oriental Studies to Area Studies to Cultural Studies. It will anchor that reexamination in the history of interpretation and pedagogy surrounding the modern Asian novel.