Overview:

This intensive training program is designed to provide doctoral candidates and early-career faculty with a rigorous, interdisciplinary understanding of the Indian Ocean world as a historically dynamic and contemporarily relevant maritime arena. Centering on technological innovation and cultural integration, the program examines how maritime technologies and cross-cultural interactions have shaped economic systems, political formations, and social worlds across the oceanic rim.

The program foregrounds a wide spectrum of technological developments, from premodern shipbuilding techniques, navigational knowledge, and maritime infrastructures to contemporary port facilities, logistics networks, and ocean-based connectivity. These technological trajectories are examined alongside patterns of cultural exchange, mobility, and encounter, tracing how ideas, practices, religious traditions, and communities circulated across the Indian Ocean in both premodern and modern contexts.

Adopting a (longue durée) perspective, the training program conceptualizes the Indian Ocean as a historically interconnected maritime space that links multiple seas, littoral zones, and coastal societies. Participants will engage with historical, archaeological, anthropological, and economic approaches, enabling a comparative analysis of patterns of continuity, rupture, and transformation across different temporal scales. Particular attention is given to how maritime perspectives complicate and challenge land-based and nation-state frameworks, offering alternative analytical lenses for understanding regional integration, mobility, and technological change in oceanic contexts.

Led by leading scholars in Indian Ocean studies, this program combines lectures, seminars, and collaborative discussions to equip participants with conceptual tools and methodological frameworks for studying oceanic histories. By emphasizing the maritime world as an analytical lens, it demonstrates how the Indian Ocean provides a distinctive vantage point for rethinking technological innovation, transregional connections, and the making of interconnected societies across Asia and beyond.

Organized by
East China Normal University
Harvard-Yenching Institute

Supported by
NYU Shanghai

Hosted by
International Cooperation and Exchange Division, East China Normal Univeristy
Department of History, East China Normal University
Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai
Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University