• When the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, which had long served as the national nexus for raising and administering funds for
  area studies, underwent their first major restructuring in thirty years, closing down their area committees, scholars interpreted this as a massive signal about the changing research environment.

• The Ford Foundation would eventually become the dominant player in shaping the area-studies program in the U.S.[3] In 1950, the foundation established the prestigious Foreign
  Area Fellowship Program (FAFP), the first large-scale national competition in support of area-studies training in the U.S. From 1953 to 1966, it contributed $270 million to 34 universities for area and language studies.

• [7] Others insisted, however, that once they were established on university campuses, area studies began to encompass a much broader and deeper intellectual agenda than the
  one foreseen by government agencies, thus not American centric.

• [6] Fields Fields are defined differently from university to university, and from department to department, but common area-studies fields include: • Due to an increasing
  interest in studying translocal, transregional, transnational and transcontinental phenomena, a Potsdam-based research network has recently coined the term “TransArea Studies” (POINTS – Potsdam International Network for TransArea Studies).

• Area studies (also known as regional studies) are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural
  regions.

• Typical area study programs involve international relations, strategic studies, history, political science, political economy, cultural studies, languages, geography, literature,
  and other related disciplines.

• Also during this period, it poured millions of dollars into the committees run jointly by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies
  for field-development workshops, conferences, and publication programs.

• History Interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States and in Western scholarship after World War II.

• Institutions Some entire institutions of higher education (tertiary education) are devoted solely to area studies such as School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the
  University of London, or the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

• Most notably, the National Defense Education Act of 1957, renamed the Higher Education Act in 1965, allocated funding for some 125 university-based area-studies units known
  as National Resource Center programs at U.S. universities, as well as for Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarships for undergraduate students and fellowships for graduate students.

• Before that war American universities had just a few faculty who taught or conducted research on the non-Western world.

• [8] Arguably, one of the greatest threats to the area studies project was the rise of rational choice theory in political science and economics.

• The term exists primarily as a general description for what are, in the practice of scholarship, many heterogeneous fields of research, encompassing both the social sciences
  and the humanities.

• [10] Following the demise of the Soviet Union, philanthropic foundations and scientific bureaucracies moved to attenuate their support for area studies, emphasizing instead
  interregional themes like “development and democracy”.

 

Works Cited

[‘”Máster Universitario Internacional de Estudios Contemporáneos de América Latina”.
1. ^ “Guia Informativo – Universidade Aberta”.
2. ^ Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy
(University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 178.
3. ^ David L. Szanton, “The Origin, Nature and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States”, in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (University of California
Press, 2004), pp. 10–11.
4. ^ Rupprecht, Tobias (2015). “5: Desk revolutionaries: Soviet Latin Americanists and internationalism in the late Soviet Union”. Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 273. ISBN
9781107102880. Retrieved 2017-08-22. Academics from Moscow State University and IMEMO [founded in 1956] often turned to broader area studies at the ILA [the Institute of Latin America (founded in 1961 as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences)] and
taught at MGIMO [founded in 1944], Moscow State University or Lumumba University [established in 1960]. Others moved from area studies into international journalism. […] All state and Party organs that dealt with cultural diplomacy drew on the staff
of area studies and their network of contacts.
5. ^ Jump up to:a b Cumings, Bruce (1997). “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. 29: 6–26. doi:10.1080/14672715.1997.10409695.
Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 2009-05-05.
6. ^ See Patrick O’Meara, “Changing perspectives on international education”, (Indiana University Press 2010), pp. 81.
7. ^ Moseley, W.G. 2009. “Area Studies in a Global Context.”
Chronicle of Higher Education. Nov 29. http://chronicle.com/article/Area-Studies-in-a-Global-Co/49284/
8. ^ See “Rational Choice Theory”, by John Scott, in Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of The Present, edited by G. Browning, A. Halcli,
and F. Webster (Sage Publications, 2000). “Rational Choice Theory”. Archived from the original on 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2008-07-30.. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
9. ^ See Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and
Asian Studies”, The National Interest 36 (summer 1994), pp. 14–22.
10. ^ “Study Asia in Lund!”. lu.se. 27 June 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2018.
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ianjmatchett/6141150299/’]