NYU Receives Luce Foundation Grant To Establish “Port Cities Environments In Global Asia” Project

New York University has received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a three-year project entitled “Port Cities Environments in Global Asia,” which is a collaborative research and education initiative involving NYU faculty in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai.

“Asian Studies is no longer defined only by regionally specific research,” says David Ludden, chair and professor in NYU’s Department of History, who directs the New York Center for Global Asia, which will house the project. “Asia is an expansive space of connectivity formed by interactions of mobility and territoriality, embracing lands and peoples all around the Silk Roads and Indian Ocean, from ancient times, and weaving all continents together in today’s globalized world.”

“The Port City Environments project will help us to build a transnational scholarly network

for Asian Studies, which only NYU could manage with our campuses in three Global Asia port cities, which bring people together in Asia and New York,” adds Ludden, who will direct the project, along with Tansen Sen and Mark Swislocki, who lead the NYU Global Asia faculty in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, respectively.

The Port Cities project has begun with discussions about the formation of collaborative clusters including faculty and graduate students on all three NYU campuses, focusing initially on five themes with contemporary and historic significance:

• “Imperial Connections,” including trade networks, from ancient times to the present;
• “Local Environments,” including ecologies, material culture, and aesthetics;
• “Routes of Mobility,” over land and water, and transport and communication technology;
• “Mobile Cultural Forms,” such as politics, religion, art, science, and medicine; and
• “Temporality,” from ancient times, with long-term transformations and comparisons