HERE are links to the NYUAD webpage and the Final Agenda 

Agenda (tentative draft)

Saturday, March 2                                       

09:00                            Breakfast at Torch Club

10:00                            Welcoming Remarks              

David Ludden, Professor of Political Economy and Globalization,  Department of History, NYU.

Shobana Shankar, Associate Professor of History, Stony Brook University

Awam Amkpa, Dean of Arts and Humanities, NYUAD  

10:30                            Labor and Work David Ludden, Discussant

             Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy – Film Screening Eat Bitter (2023)

12:00                            Coffee Break

12:15                             Imaginaries: Arhin Acheampong, Discussant

Che Onejoon – Mansudae Master Class (2021)

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan – Desiring Bollywood (Unreleased)

13:30                            Lunch at Torch Club

15:00                             Gallery Tour – Textiles across Continents, Humanities Building

15:15                             Short Talk – Malika Kraamer and Pashington Obeng

16:00 – 20:00                  Free time

20:00                            Dinner at Torch Club (Optional – Please RSVP to nyuad.humanities.fellowships@nyu.edu

Sunday, March 3, 2024

09:00                            Breakfast at Torch Club

10:00                            Histories: Shobana Shankar, Discussant

Amshu Chukki – Dispatches (2022)

Mansour Sora Wade – Dakar-Bombay (2010, Uncut)

11:00                             Closing Discussion

2019 ASIAN MIGRATION

2018 EURASIAN CONNECTIONS 

2017 PORTS AND PORT CITIES IN ASIAN CONNECTIONS

2016 ASIA AND INTRA-ASIA CONNECTIONS

Port City Environments in Global Asia

NYU Abu Dhabi Conference Center Building A6 Room 004

Wednesday January 15

9:00-9:15. Introductory Remarks

9:15-10:30. Panel: “Global Asia Collecting and Collected” Chair: Tansen Sen

• Mark Swislocki (NYU Abu Dhabi): “Forgetting Yvette Borup Andrews: An Artist among Naturalists in the American Museum of Natural History”
• Salila Kulshreshtha (Arts and Humanities, NYU Abu Dhabi): “Francis Buchanan and ‘Collecting’ Knowledge in 19th century ”
• Ezra Rashkow (Montclair State University): “‘To secure the fast vanishing animals of the world before they are exterminated’: the American Museum of Natural History’s India expeditions, 1922-1930”

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-11:45. Panel: “Global Asia and the Digital Humanities: Research, Pedagogy, Archive” Chair: Mark Swislocki

• David Wrisley and Nora Barakat (NYU Abu Dhabi) “Open Gulf: Digital History in a Global Asian Context”
• Jessica Abdala Molina, (NYU Abu Dhabi): “VIP, Research, Pedagogy, Archive”
• Israa Mograbhi (NYU Abu Dhabi), “Family Business Histories: A Research Partnership with The Tharawat Space”

12:15-1:15. Lunch: Catered in A6-117 (upstairs from conference center), from Circle Cafe

1:30-3:15. Panel: “Port City Environments in the Indian Ocean World” Chair: David Ludden

• Duane Corpis (NYU Shanghai): “Beyond the Parish: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Ports in the Pietist Networks of the Eighteenth Century”
• Elke Papelitzky (NYU Shanghai): “Connecting Ayutthaya to the World: Sailing Routes and Knowledge Transfer”
• Vidhya Raveendranathan (NYU Shanghai): “Who owns the beach? Property making, policing and coastal labour regimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Madras.”
• Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai): “Inter-Asian Connections in the Indian Ocean World: Port, City, Environments”
• Boris Wille (Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg): “Littoral Engineering: First Observations in the Maldives and Prospects for Indian Ocean Studies”

3:15-4:00 Break

4:00-5:30. Keynote Address. Don Worster (Renmin University, Beijing, China)

“China as the Ecological Civilization: What Does It Mean and What Should It Mean?” 5:45: Bus to Sheraton Corniche.

7:00-9:00. Dinner: Al Mayass, Sheraton Corniche

Thursday January 16

9:00-9:30: Coffee and Tea reception

9:30-10:45. Panel: “Coastal Environments in Monsoon Asia” Chair: David Ludden

• John Burt (NYU Abu Dhabi): “Building from the Sea: The Coral Masonry of Historic Jezirat Al-Hamrah, UAE”
• May Joseph (Pratt Institute): “Island Ecologies and Minor Seas: The Maldives, the Malabar Coast and the Lakshadweep ”
• Norman Underwood (New York University): “Making the Roman Indian Ocean: Ancient Supply Chains from Sicily to Sri ”

11:00-12:00. Panel: “New Perspectives on Port City Environments in Global Asia” Chair:

• David Ludden (New York University): “Traumas of National Territory in Global Asia”
• Peter Valenti (New York University) “Kuwait as Najdi Entrepot: The Arabian Horse Trade as a Truly Global Asia ”

12:15-1:15. Lunch: Catered in A6-117 (upstairs from conference center), Emirati Cuisine

1:30-2:30. Panel: “Belt and Road Initiatives” Chair:

• Sophia Kalantzakos (NYU Abu Dhabi): “Showdown in Djibouti: Geopolitics in the BRI Era”
• Marina Kaneti (National University of Singapore): “The Persistence of Memory: ports and maritime imaginaries in South Asia”

2:30-2:45 Break

2:45-4:00. Panel: “Eurasian Borderlands: Comparative and Connected History” Chair:

• Nora Barakat (NYU Abu Dhabi)
• Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi)
• Mark Swislocki (NYU Abu Dhabi) 4:00: Activities, anybody?

Louvre Abu Dhabi The Grand Mosque

7:00-9:00. Dinner: Indigo

New York Center for Global Asia
Port City Workshop
24-25 May, 2019
King Juan Carlos Center (53 Washington Square South), room 701

Link to presentation materials

This Port City Workshop is an effort to foster collaborative conversations about the study of port city urbanism in spaces of mobility that comprise Global Asia, from ancient times to the present. Coming at the end of the first year of our three-year project on Port City Environments, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, this meeting will inform transitions to the next phase, when we plan to generate collaborative project outcomes, online and in print.

In our weekly Colloquium meetings, we have seen how individual ports acquired ecological, physical, social, cultural, aesthetic, technological, culinary, political, and other characteristics. Spatial and temporal comparisons could perhaps form a basis for combining work on individual ports. How might ports inflect urbanism differently in different times and locations? Might distinctive coastal urban forms typify the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Malacca Straits, South China Sea, and Sea of Japan? How might modern industrial port cities differ from earlier forms? Exploring these and many other questions may promote collaborative work across a range of cases and disciplines.

Our first and most important job is to learn from one another. Toward that end, we have created a resource page that lists all participants with links to some of their relevant online information. We also have a GoogleDoc folder, where each participant has a sub-folder in which to upload the following material.

(1) A short (max 1,000 words) text to present central issues, arguments, and questions in their own research and to clarify how their work contributes to understanding of port city environments. These texts are labelled as “[lastname] Workshop Text.” Reading all Workshop Texts before the meeting will form the basis for workshop discussions.

(2) Any other texts to elucidate your work and its contribution. Please refer to those texts in your “Workshop Text” with parenthetical citations (like this).

(3) PowerPoint or other slides to use during a ten minute workshop presentation.

The workshop itself will consist of short (ten minute) presentations, discussions, and lots of time for informal conversations. The original effort to divide participants into separate groups focused respectively on building and on inhabiting port cities did not match descriptions in Workshop Texts provided by participants.

On Saturday, May 25, we will meet in the morning for general discussion and for considering possible next steps. One possibility is that some of us might collaborate to produce an issue of one of our journals; another is that we could put our work together our own web platform. That second option raises the possibility of joining together do utilize digital technologies that provide ways to combine and present our research publicly. With that in mind, Centers for Global Asia in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi are organizing a series of workshops in Digital Humanities specifically to enrich ongoing Global Asia research and to build useful online research, archival, and teaching resources. On Saturday, we can discuss relevant digital needs, interests, and technical options, to help us design suitable Digital Workshop workshops for our own purposes.

Schedule Outline

Friday May 24, 2019

8:30- 9:00 Coffee and bagels

9:00-9:25 Introductions

9:30 – 9:40 John Burt
9:45 – 9:55 Chandana Anusha
10:00 – 10:10 Debjani Bhattacharya
10:15 – 10:25 Jerome Whitington
10:30 – 10:40 Prita Meier
10:45 – 10:55 Devika Shankar
11:00 – 11:10 Vidhya Raveedranathan
11:15 – 11:25 Yifei Li

11:25 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 12:30 Discussion

12:30-1:30 Lunch with presentation of Digital Project possibilities

1:30 – 1:40 Ayesha Omer
1:45 – 1:55 Elke Papelitzky
2:00 – 2:10 David Ludden
2:15 – 2:25 Heather Lee
2:30 – 2:40 Mary Killilea

2:45 – 3:15 Discussion
3:15- 3:30 Break

3:30 – 3:40 Krishnendu Ray
3:45 – 3:55 May Joseph
4:00 – 4:10 Neelima Jeychandran
4:15 – 4:25 Nidhi Mahajan
4:30 – 4:45 Norman Underwood
4:50 – 5:00 Peter Valenti
5:05 – 5:15 Yijun Wang
5:20 – 5:30 Zvi Ben Dor

5:30 – 6:00 Discussion
6:00 – 9:00 Reception and Dinner at Torch Club 18 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003

Saturday May 25, 2019

If desired: KJCC 701: 10:00-1:00 Next Steps

Venue: Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews

Dates: March 7-9, 2019

Organizers: Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper

Program (PDF Version)

Thursday, March 7:

5:00 – 6:30 pm 

          Introductory talks by Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper

Friday, March 8:

9:30                  Opening Remarks: David Ludden, Jane Burbank, Fred Cooper

10: 00 – 12:00.    Panel 1: Indian Ocean Connections over Time and Space

Central idea: connections across the Indian Ocean (East Africa, Gulf, South Asia, Southeast Asia), covering an extended period of time, informing discussion of long-term patterns and changes.

Papers:

Duane Corbis (NYU Shanghai): “Protestant Missions and Trans-Imperial Connections in the Eighteenth-Century Indian Ocean and Beyond”

Kenneth Hall (Ball State University): “Identity and Spatiality in Indian Ocean Ports of Trade c1400-1800”

Hollian Wint (Wagner College): “Contractual Conversions, Commensurability and the Limits of Trust and Intimacy in the Nineteenth Century Indian Ocean”

Prita Meier (NYU): “East Africa and the Indian Ocean: Notes on the Aesthetics of Difference”

Commentator: Kerry Ward (Rice University)

1:30 – 3:30.  Panel 2:  Ports and Polities

Central idea: each paper examines a port city in relation to an imperial polity and considers the importance of ports to the development of empires

Papers: 

Susanah Shaw Romney (NYU): “Why Build Batavia? Port Cities, Empires, and Early Modern Oceans”

Trina Hogg (Oregon State University): “Abolition and Apprenticeship in Nineteenth-Century Freetown, Sierra Leone”

Ian Coller (University of California Irvine): “Port/e City: Marseille as a Hinge of Empire”

            Commentator: Edyta Bojanowska (Yale)

4:00 – 6:00.   Panel 3: Continental Connections

Central idea: papers explore long distance connections, over both land and sea, including the formation of regional structures and concepts such as Eurasia and Eurafrica

Papers:

Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer (NYU): “The Notions of Border and Border Formation in the Early Modern Ottoman-Safavid Relations”

Thomas Kuehn (Simon Fraser): “Government contractors, tax lords, and supply lines: Non-territorial forms of imperial governance in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1914”

Tatiana Linkhoeva (NYU): “Five Races Living in Harmony: Japan and Eurasia”

Muriam Davis (UC Santa Cruz): “EurAfrica and the Postwar Reinvention of the Mediterranean”

Commentator: Zvi Benite Ben-Dor (NYU)

Saturday, March 9:

9:00 -11:00.  Panel 4: Ports and Hinterlands

Central idea: exploration of the regional connections of port cities (including desert-edge as well as maritime ports)

Papers:

Karl Appuhn (NYU): “How Wide Was My Hinterland? The Spatial Dynamics of Mediterranean Commercial Centers in the Early Modern Period”

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi (University of California Riverside): “Who Broke Lagos?: Mapping the Politics of a West African Lagoon Complex”

Lale Can (City College of New York): “Crossing the Bosphorus: Central Asian Hajjis in Ottoman Istanbul, 1869-1914”          

Commentator: Norman Underwood (NYU)

11:15-1:15.    Panel 5: Oceans

Central idea: to explore and compare relations within and across different bodies of water and how they affect lands within and adjacent to them

            Papers:

Ravi Ahuja (Göttingen): “Indian seafarers, ‘racial management’ and the British Empire”Seamen, 19^th and 20^th centuries”

Lisa Lindsay (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): “Transatlantic Itineraries and Imperial Echoes in the Nineteenth Century”

David Rainbow (University of Houston): “New York to Paris by Rail: Pacific Empires and the Bering Strait, 1898-1907”

Nadin Heé (Freie Universität Berlin): “How Tuna became a Global Commons. Migrating Species, People and Knowledge across Oceans and Empires”

Commentator: Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan)

1:30 – 2:30.   Closing remarks

HERE IS THE LINK to the Google Form in which you can enter information concerning your participation in the Conference. 

Here is the link to the GoogleDoc containing abstracts of conference presentations.

Conference Program Plan (on 17 May 2018)

Goal, Format, and Procedure

This conference launches our Global Asia “Port City Environments” project, which is being funded by the Luce Foundation, over the next three years. Our goal in this project is to form collaborative relationships among NYU faculty and graduate students for research, teaching, and academic resource development on Asia’s very long-term globalization, based in NYU’s three Global Asia port city environments, in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai. Broad themes for this project are summarized in the graphic above: we think of port city environments in Global Asia as being composed and transformed over time by interactions of territoriality and mobility.

We launch the Luce Project in this conference by scanning the wide disciplinary range and thematic diversity of research that we could weave together in studies of port city environments. Everyone here will have a specific research interest, and eleven participants have volunteered to present representative projects. We have grouped them in two overlapping sets that indicate one way to frame collaboration: port city environments are territories shaped over time by mobility; and they also anchor networks of mobility that connect territorial sites over time.

We ask each presenter (1) to send an abstract to upload on GoogleDocs for everyone to read, and (2) to make a brief (15 minute) presentation, focusing on major themes that may form the basis for collaborative conversations.

On Friday, after each panel, we discuss themes that link he papers and also methodological and other ways to formulate collaborative conversations. We invite presenters and all participants in this conference to focus on what connects them, rather than on what makes them unique.

On Saturday morning, we start by considering one model of collaboration that could be applied in all three NYU port city environments: The New York Diaspora City Project focuses on the history of global migrant ethnic complexity in New York City. Next, we consider a method for collaborative teaching and research: digital humanities.

On Saturday afternoon, we break into discussion groups to work on collaborative cluster formation; and we end the day with a discussion of next steps, particularly the August Shanghai Conference, but also other events that are in the works.

Friday 25 May (KJCC Atrium and Auditorium)

9:00-10:00 Mini-Breakfast (KJCC atrium; coffee available throughout day)

10:00-11:00: Introductions, framing concepts (mobility, territoriality, and temporality), and the organization of the Luce “Port City Environments” project.

11:00-12:30. Panel 1: (Trans)forming Territory in Mobile Spaces

David Ludden (NY) “Imperial Nations and Mobile Spaces: Sylhet, Tirunelveli, Arakan”

Robert Parthesius (AD) “Port Cities in the Indian Ocean as Shared World Heritage”

Prita Meier (NY), “Photography as an artifact of mobility in Swahili port cities”

John Burt (AD) “Environmental Issues and Port City Urbanization in the Arabian Gulf”

Matt Shutzer (NY) “Fossil Fuel Value Chains in the Indian Ocean, 1870 – 1914”

Mark Selden (NY) “Environment and Development in China, U.S., and Asia-Pacific.”

   12:30-1:00 discussion of the panel presentations

1-2. Lunch

2:00-3:15. Panel 2 (Trans)formative Networks Connecting Territories

Tansen Sen (SH) “Temple Heritage of a Chinese Migrant Community.”

Mark Swislocki (AD) “TBA”

Duane Corpis (SH) “Protestant Charitable Networks 18^th C India”

Susanah Shah Romney (NY) “Batavia: connecting Indian and Atlantic oceans”

Norman Underwood (NY) “Roman Trade with India and China in the Digital Age”

    3:15-3:45 discussion of the panel presentations

3:45-4:00 Coffee Break

4:00-5:00 Open discussion to formulate collaborative conversations

5:00-7:00 Reception

Saturday 26 May (KJCC Atrium, Auditorium, and classrooms)

9:00-10:00.   Mini breakfast

10:00-11:00. Cluster Concept: The Migrant Ethnic Complexity of Port City Environments. One Model: “New York Diaspora City.” David Ludden, Jack Tchen, and Aruna Magier.

11:00-12:00. Digital Humanities: applications, training, and collaboration

1:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:30 Cluster Group Meetings and: KJCC Seminar rooms and History Lounge.

3:30-5:00 Cluster Group Reports: KJCC auditorium.

5:00-5:30 Looking forward Shanghai Global Asia Conference in August

Monday 28 May: Business meeting. Open to all. (History Department Lounge, KJCC 4^th Floor). Please note: Monday is Memorial Day and the University is closed. Entrance to KJCC requires advanced arrangements.