Since the end of the Second World War, area studies has emerged in universities in the United States as the dominant institutional form for the study of other parts of the world. Historians have long described how U.S. security and economic interests, especially relative to the Soviet Union and decolonizing nations, animated interdisciplinary efforts to understand those regions and their populations, fueled by funding from philanthropic institutions and the U.S. government alike. Area studies programs have certainly faced challenges before, including criticism of their role in US anti-democratic interventions abroad, funding cuts in the 1970s, and post-Cold War questions about the utility of ‘areas’ at all. But the challenges to Area Studies today are outright existential. Within the past couple of years, the SSRC’s international dissertation research fellowship has been cancelled, Title VI funding has stopped, and the NEH has prioritized funding US-centered projects.

In this moment of a paradigmatic shift in area studies in the United States, our panel proposes to discuss historical alternatives to traditional area studies as they emerged after World War II. We are interested in the interdisciplinary study of ‘area,’ both within and outside of the United States, and especially in the study of area that preceded formal “area studies.” In her paper on medieval studies, Carol Symes argues that the intellectual establishment of medieval Europe as a coherent area of study after World War I created a prototype for later area studies developed to advance American policy agendas. Kiki Mackaman-Lofland proposes we view pre-World War II North African studies at the University of Algiers under French colonialism as a form of area studies. Doing so, she argues, reveals colonial sciences as in the intellectual lineage of area studies and encourages decentering the United States as the epicenter of area studies in the past and present. Chloe Hawkey looks to the field of American Studies in the US, which she argues is not itself a form of area studies but did important background work in establishing ideas of American culture against which area studies set other cultures. Shellen Wu, meanwhile, will explore our present moment of threat to area studies, examining new historical scholarship on Asia’s engagement with the world and how the funding collapse of the last year could also be seen as an opportunity to reimagine theoretical frameworks for the study of Asian countries. Through the presentation of these diverse approaches scholars have historically taken to studying different places, we hope to invite broader discussion on models and alternatives to researching areas outside of the area studies framework.