The AAS-in-Asia was created to provide an academic platform dedicated to Asian scholars who cannot attend our larger annual events in North America.

It was designed to be smaller in size and more geographically and financially accessible to Asianists based in Asia. Throughout the years, this initiative has grown and expanded far beyond our expectations, with host institutions in various locations of Asia such as Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, India, Thailand, and South Korea. With the rotation of the event location every year, this platform has enabled early-career scholars, and especially those from underrepresented regions and countries of Asia, to exchange knowledge, attend skill-building workshops, explore collaboration and publishing opportunities, and develop their professional network.

The 2023 AAS-in-Asia in Daegu is the 8th iteration of the AAS-in-Asia conference, happening after a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The last AAS-in-Asia, which was in partnership with a consortium of Japanese institutions, took place entirely virtually in August 2020. Thus, Daegu is the first in-person conference since Thailand in 2019 and we are expecting more than 1,200 people from more than 40 countries with 270 scheduled panels.

The theme of the Daegu conference, “Memory, Preservation and Documentation,” has attracted an unusually high number of excellent quality panel proposals . The program committee received more than 400 applications, the most ever since the AAS-in-Asia initiative was first launched in Singapore in 2014. Our intellectual and cultural exchanges promise to be rich and fulfilling over these 4 days of conference.

I would like to thank Kyungpook National University and the Institute of Humanities Studies, in particular, for graciously hosting us this year.

Generous support that made this event possible came from the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the Tang Prize Foundation, the Asian Cultural Center, the Korea Foundation, The Korea Tourism Organization, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Ministry of Education. AAS-in-Asia also thanks the city of Daegu for welcoming us.