Asian American Studies Program

Asian American Studies is a multidisciplinary field of study that grapples with pressing questions of identity, belonging, and power from the perspectives of Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Asian/Pacific diasporic histories, communities, and cultures. Since its emergence out of the 1960s-1970s US social movements, Asian American Studies has aimed to create knowledge that is relevant and useful for solving big problems of inequity and injustice. Scholars, practitioners, and students approach these puzzles from a variety of disciplinary perspectives spanning the arts, humanities, and social and behavioral sciences. Indiana University Bloomington's Asian American Studies program (AAST), established in 2007, maintains this vision through our research, creative activity, teaching, and programming with the goal of generating novel possibilities for the globalizing world of the 21st century.