Academics
Undergraduate
East Asian Studies Minor
East Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz offers an interdisciplinary exploration of China, Japan, and beyond. Students build language skills in Chinese or Japanese, study the region’s historical foundations, and engage with diverse fields such as literature, politics, art, film, and sociology to gain both depth and breadth in understanding East Asia.
Affiliations
Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories
The Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories, founded in 2006 and housed in the Institute for Humanities Research, fosters collaborative and transnational research on how the Asia Pacific War has been remembered across the region. Its work explores how war memories shape identities, inform politics, economics, science, and culture, and circulate among Pacific societies to create shared regional connections.
Association for Asian Studies
Founded in 1941, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS)—the largest society of its kind, with approximately 8,000 members worldwide—is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia.
Okinawa Memories Initiative
The Okinawa Memories Initiative is a collaborative, international public history project that explores the founding years of the American military occupation of Okinawa. The project is inspired by a collection of photos taken in Okinawa in 1952 by an American Army Captain: Charles Eugene Gail.
News
Humanities EXCEL Fellows build community through hands-on Internships
At UC Santa Cruz, the Humanities EXCEL Program is helping Humanities undergraduates discover new pathways to professional growth and connect to local communities through paid internships.
Humanistic approaches to urgent environmental issues
At UC Santa Cruz, the environmental humanities encourage us to ask: what happens when we stop treating the natural world as merely a backdrop, resource, or object of study—and instead treat it as a web of interconnected lives?
Get to know our researchers
Meet some of the passionate people leading our impact and innovation. Public support and federal funding make this work possible.