Sponsored by Penn State’s Department of Asian Studies and the College of the Liberal Arts, the Global Asias Initiative (GAI) encompasses several interrelated projects that bring into relation, but not necessarily into alignment, work in Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian Diaspora studies. Under the direction of Tina Chen, the Initiative cultivates multi-disciplinary collaboration through the work of an award-winning journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias; the biennial Global Asias conference; and the annual Global Asias Summer Institute.  Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge is committed to generating thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist (national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global) modes. The Global Asias conferences bring scholars from around the country and the world to participate in lively intellectual exchange while the Summer Institutes are designed to provide mentorship and support for junior colleagues.  Collectively, these projects study Asia and its diasporas, East to West, across and around the Pacific, from a variety of humanistic perspectives—anthropology, art history, literature, history, sociology, and political science—in order to develop comparative analyses that recognize Asia’s place(s) in the development of global culture and history.