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This Project brings together scholars working in different regions and disciplines to examine historical and cultural interconnections through histories of trade, militarism, media, and migration. The Project takes into consideration new approaches to the studies of areas and nations that have come into view over the last few years; we are especially interested in using gender, race, and sexuality studies to approach questions of the transnational. In addition, thinking of social, economic, and political processes in terms of interconnecting networks that are transnational in form enhances the emerging foci at UCI in New Media Studies, Technoscience Studies and Environmental Studies. The Project brings together research that addresses flows of people, goods, labor and media and the encounters and conflicts of cultures across different times periods. It encompasses research on questions of hybridity and creolization, and includes critical geographies of space and place. It cultivates work on the many early as well as contemporary forms of connections between regions and cultures. It allows a reconceptualization of regions as transoceanic, tracing the ways in which oceans and seas also constituted cultures of encounter, exchange and conflict. The Project enables the incorporation of the U.S. into what has been called "area studies," not simply by seeing the United States as another area, but also by seeing the U.S. as both a particular site of academic knowledge production and as intimately connected to many other regions through innumerable networks. By stressing the terms "cultural" and "historical" as the foci for the Project, we do not imply that the one is exclusive of the other, but rather that all cultural processes have histories and these histories are also shaped by knowledges deemed to be powerful or important within particular cultures. These terms also suggest why the location of the Project in the School of Humanities produces works and conversations that focus on humanistic inquiries, although they would also endeavor to facilitate collaborations with the sciences, social sciences, and the arts.
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