Message From The Director

Now well into its third decade, the Asia Research Institute (ARI) is among the world’s foremost centres for academic research on, and from Asia. By bringing together scholars working across the social sciences and humanities, and providing a platform for collaboration with other fields, the Institute forms a vital space for Asia-focused interdisciplinary research, working also with a broad, conceptual understanding of ‘Asia’. The location of ARI at NUS, one of the Asia-Pacific region’s premier universities, and of NUS itself in Singapore – a long established hub for movements of people and ideas – provides us with an incomparable institutional and geographical home for research on Asia.

ARI’s modus operandi is to bring the finest scholars, both early career and more established, to Singapore to work in inter-disciplinary teams in an environment that encourages innovative thinking and supports research excellence. Research at ARI is structured into six cross-disciplinary research clusters and four research programmes. The clusters - Asian Migration, Asian Urbanisms, Food Politics and Society, Inter-Asia Engagements, Religion and Globalisation, and Science, Technology and Society - are led by senior scholars who have joint appointments with one of the university’s disciplinary departments. The clusters hold regular seminars, workshops, reading groups and conferences, providing sites for critical exchanges between scholars with allied intellectual interests - but different disciplinary ways of seeing and methodological inclinations. The programmes are organised around the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Professorship in Arabia Asia Studies, Asian Peace Programme, Asian Infrastructures and the Nalanda Professorship in India -China Studies. These sustain strategic initiatives beyond the structure and funding cycles of the research clusters. Funded variously through generous gifts or international partnership arrangements, the programmes either cross-cut existing cluster research themes or pursue stand-alone agendas. Each of the programmes extends the Institute’s impact and visibility beyond the scholarly research activities of established research clusters.

The majority of ARI’s academic staff are early career postdoctoral fellows and mid-career research fellows. They are attached to one – sometimes two – of our research clusters or programmes. ARI’s scholarly dynamism is also sustained by short-term visiting fellows from across the globe. The mixture of permanent NUS staff, dedicated postdoctoral researchers, more established fellows, Singapore-based research associates, and researchers linked to projects, as well as short-term visitors, makes ARI a stimulating milieu for the advancement of scholarship on Asia – historical, contemporary and future-facing.

While ARI is a research institute, not a think tank or a policy centre, our work engages important challenges facing the region and wider worlds. These range from problems of household plastic waste, to implications of the use of animals in traditional medicine, to the spatial dynamics of cross-national families, to the governance of carbon sinks. These projects and a variety of other research initiatives are supported and by grants from both national and international funding bodies. Already plugged into a rich network of international associations and collaborations, ARI continues to evolve as a centre from where Asia-focused research engages practical as well as scholarly questions that are planetary in scope.