The Global Asias Summer Institute operates to mentor and support early-career scholars.  Centered around a different theme each year, the SI encourages multi-disciplinary and cross-field intellectual exchange.  The SI is open to advanced graduate students and junior faculty within 5 years of receiving their PhD, and cultivates the work of participants through seminar discussion of relevant scholarship and intensive workshopping of manuscripts.

These week-long seminars are co-directed by PSU faculty and colleagues from around the country and Penn State provides stipends to participants to support attendance.  The themes covered since the inception of the SI in 2014 include:

Reading and Textual Production in Early Modern China (2014), co-directed by On-cho Ng, Kai-Wing Chow, & Hung-lam Chu

Asian/American Migratory Aesthetics (2015), co-directed by Tina Chen & Eric Hayot

Decolonizing Science in Asia (2016), co-directed by Prakash Kumar, Projit Bihari Mukharji, & Amit Prasad

Trans-Asian Indigeneity (2017), co-directed by Charlotte Eubanks, Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, & Neal Keating

Infrastructure (2018), co-directed by Jessamyn Abel & Leo Coleman

Digital Asias (2019), co-directed by Jonathan E. Abel  & Joseph Jonghyun Jeon 

Remaking Worlds: The Geographical Imagination of Global Asias Through Art & Visual Culture (2020), co-directed by Laura Kina & Chang Tan

The Politics of Food in Global Asias (2021), co-directed by Krishnendu Ray & Jooyeon Rhee

Tactics and Theories for a Global Asias Praxis (2022), co-directed by Tina Chen & Charlotte Eubanks

Archipelagic Asias (2023), co-directed by Leo Ching & Nicolai Volland

Involuntary Migration (2024), co-directed by Annie Isabel Fukushima, Kristin Roebuck, and Tina Chen

Work from the SI often makes its way into the journal—sometimes in essay form, sometimes as a Convergence feature, and sometimes as a special issue.  Such synergy reflects the integrative collaboration facilitated by the Global Asias Initiative.