Area studies, the interdisciplinary study of region-specific knowledge, is under threat in the United States. Some area studies programs are facing immediate dismantling by red-state legislatures. Others, at private universities or in blue states, are more likely to experience a slow decline through dozens of small cuts that may leave them untenable. While most area studies programs are small, their loss would ripple through a wide range of disciplines, impoverishing teaching, research and scholarship across the humanities and social sciences.
Most contemporary area studies departments were developed and funded in part to meet perceived U.S. national security needs during the Cold War. Nonetheless, area studies programs have, from the outset, reached far beyond policy concerns. They should be saved, not (just) out of concern for the national interest, but because they are fundamental to our modern universities. Area studies have helped to pluralize our understanding of the drivers of history, the sources of literary greatness and the origins and uses of the sciences, enabling scholars to challenge narratives of “Western” normativity.
As the second Trump administration has thrown federal support for area studies into question, some scholars have come to the field’s defense from the perspective of U.S. security and national interests. They have noted that cutting government funding for programs such as the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships will linguistically and intellectually impoverish future cadres of policymakers. But in the present political landscape, in which the Trump administration has demonstrated little if any interest in maintaining the trappings of U.S. soft power, it seems unlikely that the federal government will restore funding for language education and the development of regionally specific knowledge. Their ability to contribute to U.S. soft power will not save area studies.
The future of area studies lies beyond state security and policy interests and instead with the core mission of our universities. If we are to save area studies, we must admit—and celebrate—the fact that the benefits of area studies have never been just about U.S. national interests. Indeed, area studies have decisively shaped how scholarship and education are practiced on U.S. university campuses.
Since the 1950s, area studies programs have quietly informed disciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences, changing education even for students who never take courses offered by formal area studies departments. In part, this is because scholars educated through area studies programs teach in history, anthropology, political science, religious studies and a bevy of other programs that require a depth of linguistic and regional knowledge. These scholars introduce global, regional and non-Western knowledge to students at colleges and universities that may not host their own area studies programs, but that rely on the cultivation of regionally specific knowledge at institutions that have invested in and embraced the area studies model. Some of these scholars undertook area studies as their primary field of research. In other cases, including my own, they hold Ph.Ds. in other disciplines but would not have been able to conduct their research without access to the language and regionally specific courses offered by area studies programs at their universities.
The influence of area studies stretches beyond this immediate impact on scholars and their students. Area studies scholars have insisted that there is just as much to be learned within Middle Eastern, Latin American or sub-Saharan African literature, histories and cultures as there is in Western European or the modern North American Anglophone traditions. At their best, area studies have reminded us that none of these formations or knowledge traditions exist in isolation, that there are no “pure” or untouched civilizations and that ideas and practices have always circulated and shaped each other, whether violently or peacefully. Certainly, many scholars knew and studied these realities well before the advent of the contemporary area studies model. Nonetheless, the presence of area studies in many prominent U.S. universities from the 1950s onward enabled a quiet but certain reckoning with historical scholarly exclusions and helped to internationalize U.S. campus communities.
Federal and state cuts and institutional austerity are now reshaping university departments and programs across many disciplines. But area studies programs are especially at risk in part because they are excluded from some calls for the defense of the humanities or liberal arts that take an older, pre–area studies view of our shared cultural and historical knowledge. Even more troublingly, the far right is eager to claim and weaponize the humanities for itself. Its vision of the humanities, and of the liberal arts more generally, is one that not only rejects area studies, but also seeks to undo critical approaches to European and Anglophone literature and history. The far right portrays the humanities in triumphalist civilizational terms, imagining a fallacious pure Western (white) tradition that justifies contemporary forms of dominance and exclusion.
Scholars within the fields that have seen increased interest from the far right are fighting their own battles against these imagined, reactionary pasts. But those of us within area studies—and fields that have been enriched by area studies—also have our part to play. We must refuse to concede to narratives of human history, literature, culture and politics that write out the experiences and contributions of non-European, non-Anglophone or nonwhite individuals and communities.
The most extreme current threat to area studies, like many threats to the humanities and social sciences more generally, comes from hostile red-state legislatures. I completed an area studies M.A. in central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, a program that hosts languages such as Mongolian, Kurdish and Uyghur, which are rarely if ever taught at other institutions in North America. That program, like many of Indiana’s other vaunted area studies degrees (and many other programs) is currently slated for suspension with “teach-out toward elimination.”
Yet even institutions seemingly removed from such direct political pressure seem poised to reduce their engagement with area studies. I am now an assistant professor in South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, a program that has produced renowned scholars of South Asia globally and offers languages ranging from Tibetan to Tamil. The university has proposed decreasing the number of departments within its Division of the Arts and Humanities and limiting offerings in language classes that do not regularly attract large numbers of students. These policies could result in significant cuts to relatively small area studies programs like my own. And none of these proposals are unique. Whether rapidly or slowly, universities across the country are walking back their commitments to area studies, especially the study of non-Western languages.
There are actions that we, as area studies scholars, can take to ensure the longevity of our work. As we revel in the complexities of the regions we have chosen to study, we sometimes forget how unfamiliar they remain to many American undergraduate students. Unfamiliarity, however, should not mean inaccessibility. The Shahnameh or the Mahabharata may be less familiar to many of our students than The Iliad and The Odyssey, but there is no reason they should be less accessible. The study of modern sub-Saharan African histories or Southeast Asian languages is not intrinsically more esoteric than the study of modern North American histories or Western European languages. Our goal must be to welcome students into topics that seem unfamiliar and to share in their joy as what was once unfamiliar slowly becomes part of their system of knowledge.
Likewise, one of the most significant challenges stemming from the Cold War foundations of area studies is that the discipline is often organized along a mid-20th century, U.S.-centric understanding of global political fault lines and cultural boundaries associated with nation-states. These boundaries, as many scholars have shown, do not always reflect how people experience and understand their own cultures and histories. Yet scholars in area studies have become increasingly adept at working beyond these boundaries. Many of us use the framework of area studies to challenge understandings of regional borders as natural, identifying forms of mobility and connectivity that upend assumptions built on the locations of modern lines on modern maps.
Even as we make area studies more accessible and more reflective of transregional cultural worlds, area studies programs will never be moneymakers for U.S. universities. As the novelist Lydia Kiesling, a beneficiary of area studies and specifically of FLAS funding, noted in Time, “The market will never decide that Uzbek class is a worthwhile proposition, or that it is important for a K–12 teacher in a cash-strapped district to attend a free symposium on world history.” And so, in the absence of federal funding for these programs, any defense of area studies must ultimately come down to asking—begging!—our universities to look beyond the financial motives that seem to have overtaken their educational missions.
Ultimately, area studies allows us to embrace, even revel in, cultural, social and linguistic particularity and specificity and, through understanding these differences, recognize our shared humanity. At their best, area studies programs help students and the public dismantle cultural hierarchies through knowledge of non-Western traditions that have depth and heterogeneity equal to that of their European and Anglophone counterparts. In our present moment, as a dizzying range of university programs are destroyed by right-wing legislatures or threatened by aggressive institutional austerity, it may seem futile to call for the preservation of this seemingly small corner of the U.S. intellectual universe. Yet in an era when governments, both in the U.S. and abroad, seem beholden to narrow and exclusionary nationalist interests, fields of study that center the pluralism within our shared global histories and cultures are needed in our universities more than ever.
