The migration of Indo-Europeans in the fourth millennium BCE shaped the earliest connections between the landmasses that later became known as Europe and Asia. Over the subsequent millennia, sporadic pathways became well-travelled routes, with stable settlements and infrastructures that sustained and encouraged the repeated movements of people across Eurasia. Laborers, traders, missionaries, conquerors, tourists, translators, and scholars from a variety of linguistic, ethnic and religious backgrounds crisscrossed the two regions. As a result of human travel, the circulations of commodities, religious ideas, technical skills, medical knowledge, artistic styles, and literary traditions between the two regions influenced and re-shaped the local social and cultural worlds of communities separated by great distances. These circulations took place through overland as well as maritime routes, and, in recent years, by air as well.

The third annual conference of the Center for Global Asia focuses on many of these connectivities and circulations between and across Europe and Asia.  With panels ranging from the translation of astronomical concepts to the consumption of tea across Eurasia, from the historical movements of religious ideas to the contemporary movements of migrants throughout the region, the conference provides a space for scholars from different humanistic and social scientific disciplines to discuss work covering multiple areas and time periods of Eurasian history. The goal of the conference is to move beyond the nation-state as the primary axis of scholarly analysis and to place local and global developments into dialogue with one another.

A special highlight of the program is the keynote address to be delivered by Professor Morris Rossabi, which examines the crucial role of the Mongols in connecting the two continents. The final day of the conference also includes two panels related to NYU’s project on “Port City Environments in Global Asia,” which has been generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Hosted by New York University, Shanghai and the Center for Global Asia, the conference is co-sponsored by the Asia Research Center, Fudan University; New York University, New York; the Institute of China Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences; and the Henry Luce Foundation. 

Together the analysis of Eurasian connections and port cities environments demonstrate the entangled world of global Asia and offers innovative ways of understanding the historical and contemporary relations among regions and societies.