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Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies Program

Global Asian Studies Program

The Global Asian Studies Program at Northeastern encourages students to look carefully and critically at the complex ways that people in Asian countries have been involved with one another and with the rest of the world in both the past and the present.

Majors & Minors

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Learn about the students who studied with us.

Alex Ren

  • Alex declared a double-major in Economics and Asian Studies. She wanted both the quantitative social science experience and a focused humanities education.
  • She took the course Chinese Film and Chinese Pop Culture. Alex enjoyed being able to connect pop culture to historical and social happenings.
  • Alex went on co-op as the iCater Admin Assistant for the Pine Street Inn, a leading provider of homelessness services. Her role included social media, event planning, course instruction, and more.
  • She worked at Mass General Hospital as their Special Events Co-op, supporting several in-person, hybrid, and virtual events for MGH Development.
  • For her capstone, she explored gender politics from an Asian queer theoretical perspective, specifically researching the growing genre of BL (Boys Love) and its Chinese subculture of Danme.
  • She graduated in 2022.
  • ..

Andrew Small

  • Andrew took Chinese Film, where the class would spend a day discussing film theory and Chinese politics, then another watching well-curated art house films.
  • With PhD candidate Tim Fraser, he collected biographical data on the members on Japanese reconstructional committees at the municipal, prefectural, and national levels.
  • Andrew worked on an intergenerational research team with Professor Daniel Aldrich conducting comparative analysis between Boston and Japan's climate change policy.
  • Andrew completed his first co-op remotely during the pandemic with the Japanese nonprofit Safecast, doing immersive field research on Fukushima.
  • He interned with JICA's Kyrgyzstan office on the regional economic development project "One Village One Product."
  • Andrew joined NU Political Review and focused his contributions on stories about Japanese Politics and the Asia-Pacific.
  • He was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to continue his research on disaster preparedness and resilience in Japan. ..
Global Asian Studies at Northeastern University

With the dawn of the 21st Century, Asia has become the fastest growing continent on the globe. Diverse and fascinating, the Asian societies are rising in economic prominence, and are exerting increasing political, social and cultural influence on the world. Founded in 1984, Asian Studies at Northeastern is an interdepartmental program that focuses on the histories, cultures, and politics of the dynamic nation-states of East, Southeast and South Asia, while also exploring their transnational interactions and their global diasporas, especially to the United States. In so doing, it encourages students to look carefully and critically at the complex ways that people in Asian countries have been involved with one another and with the rest of the world in both the past and the present.

Experiential Academics
Director’s Welcome
Read a welcome from our director, Dr. Philip Thai

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