Symposium, March 6 2026:
New Area Studies / New Century: 25 Years In
On Friday March 6th 2026 the New Area Studies Research Centre at the University of East Anglia will be hosting a one day symposium: New Area Studies / New Century: 25 Years In.
We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker has been confirmed as Claudia Derichs. Claudia Derichs, PhD, is professor of Transregional Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (HU). She has studied Japanese and Arabic in Bonn, Tokyo and Cairo, holds a PhD in Japanology (1994, University of Bonn, Germany) and in Political Science (2004, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany). She assumed professorships in Political Science at the universities of Hildesheim and Marburg before moving to HU Berlin and fully committing to the field of Area Studies. Her research covers gender, religion, and political violence in Japan, Southeast Asia and the Middle East/West Asia. Her work promotes new orientations in Area Studies. In 2017, she published the monograph Knowledge Production, Area Studies and Global Cooperation (Routledge 2017).
Professor Derichs’s talk will be titled: "Blaming, claiming, shaping: New trends in Area Studies":
Area Studies have gone through a vivid trajectory from serving geopolitical purposes during World War II and the Cold War towards defending their raison d’être in competition with so-called systematic disciplines. A particular discursive terrain is occupied by attempts to align Area Studies with the study of International Relations (IR). The lecture subscribes to the rather recent notion of New Area Studies and discusses their difference to Comparative Area Studies, which attracted attention throughout the 2000s. A special conceptual angle in New Area Studies is a multi-scalar and relational understanding of the terms “area” and/or “region”, making the notions of “process geographies” and “emotional geographies” productive for doing Area Studies. This encompasses translocal, transnational, transregional and transcultural perspectives, all of which refer to particular conceptions of what the prefix trans is meant to designate. In view of the relationship between Area Studies and disciplines, the lecture proposes a radical out-of-the-box thinking. Examples from Asia and the Middle East – or WANA (West Asia and North Africa) and NAWA (North Africa-West Asia) in a more critical diction – form the empirical base of the argument. They are rooted in close to three decades of research on and in the respective regions, a strong commitment to the principle of “no research about you without you” (“forschen mit statt forschen über” in German), and an equally strong belief in the importance of language skills in Area Studies.
More information https://newareastudiesuea.com/events