Asian studies, a term used usually in the United States for Oriental studies and is concerned with the Asian peoples, their cultures, languages, history and politics. Within the Asian sphere, Asian studies combines aspects of sociology, history, cultural anthropology and many other disciplines to study political, cultural and economic phenomena in Asian traditional and contemporary societies. Asian studies forms a field of post-graduate study in many universities.

It is a branch of area studies, and many Western universities combine Asian and African studies in a single faculty or institute, like SOAS in London. It is often combined with Islamic studies in a similar way. The history of the discipline in the West is covered under Oriental studies.

Philosophy and Religion]

Tan Tai Yong is Professor of South Asian history at the National University of Singapore. He is currently the Vice-Provost (Student Life) and Director of the Institute of South Asian Studies, an autonomous university-level research institute in NUS.

Professor Tan obtained his first two degrees - BA (Hons), 1986, and MA, 1989 - from the National University of Singapore. He then went off to Cambridge University, where he earned his doctorate in South Asian history in 1992, under the supervision of Anthony Low. He has been a faculty member of the Department of History at NUS since 1992 and served the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences as Sub-Dean (1994-1999), Head of the History Department (2000-2003), Vice-Dean (2001-2003) and Dean (2004-2009).

Professor Tan's research interests are in the areas of Sikh diaspora, civil-military relations, social and political history of colonial Punjab, and the partition of South Asia. Lately, he has shifted his attention to Southeast Asia, and has been exploring issues of networks formation and the place of maritime cities in the region.

Vera Schwarcz (born 1947) is Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. Her BA was from Vassar College, with a MA from Yale, a MAA from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Born in Romania, Schwarcz has taught Chinese history at Stanford University, Wesleyan University, as well as at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Beijing University and Centre Chine in Paris. She is serving currently as Director of the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies and Chair of the East Asian Studies Program at Wesleyan. She is the author of eight books, including the prize-winning Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (Yale University Press, 1999) as well as Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu (Yale, 1986); The Chinese Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1984) and most recently—Place and Memory in Singing Crane Garden (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). She is also the author of three books of poetry including A Scoop of Light and In The Garden of Memory—a collaboration with the Prague-born Israeli artist Chava Pressburger.