As part of our Central Asia Initiative, we'll host a series of film screenings and discussions in 2008, including one on the documentary "Koryo Saram--the Unreliable People" (2006). The view of a landscape in Kazakhstan is from the film by Y. David Chung.

Gateway for Asia at UCLA

This web site is not the only new thing at the UCLA Asia Institute.

The fresh look of the UCLA Asia Institute web site reflects new priorities and plans. We've cleaned out old reference pages and obsolete hyperlinks—more than 5,000 electronic files—and focused more of this site on things that we think about every day. Our initiatives, programs, and publications encourage collaboration across campus and bring Asia and Los Angeles nearer to one another.

This fall, we launched a collaborative research and exchange project with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai. In addition to offering pre-dissertation fellowships for graduate students in any discipline, we are sending UCLA faculty members and inviting Chinese colleagues to do interdisciplinary work on matters of historical and contemporary importance, especially projects that cross places and periods. Asia Institute Director Bin Wong is personally leading this initiative.

We are planning a Central Asia Initiative to see to it that, in the words of History Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "we have a place to think about the region on campus." He adds, "People have always looked at it as an object to manipulate." This initiative will mobilize intellectual capital from Asia Institute member centers including the one that Subrahmanyam directs, the UCLA Center for India and South Asia, and from disciplines such as anthropology, geography, history, and archaeology. Check this site for details and related events, including a screening and discussion next spring of the documentary film "Koryo Saram – the Unreliable People" (2006) with Y. David Chung, the director. (The event is part of a film series on Central Asia cosponsored by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies.)

The new web site is intended to serve, like the Asia Institute itself, as a gateway to Asian studies on the UCLA campus. We are improving campus-related resources and have already made faculty members and their areas of expertise easier to find on the site. Look to the top of this page for our calendar of events, funding opportunities, UCLA experts, and news and information about our member centers. Look left for our own long-term and collaborative projects, including electronic publications written for broad audiences.

At the two Web-based publications we sustain, editors and other professional staff work as colleagues with interns from UCLA and the broader community, as well as with far-flung contributors. Offering voices and perspectives that are too rarely heard, AsiaMedia, published five days a week, and Asia Pacific Arts, a biweekly magazine, teach millions of readers about Asian journalism and media dynamism and about Pacific Rim arts and entertainment.

We hope you'll visit our whole family of web sites and let us know how they can serve your needs.

Published: Thursday, December 06, 2007

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