Asia
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Countries and Areas in this Region
Countries and Areas in this Region
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Bhutan
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Cambodia
  • China
  • Democratic People's Republic of Korea
  • Hong Kong
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Japan
  • Kazakhstan
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • Lao People's Democratic Republic
  • Macao
  • Malaysia
  • Maldives
  • Mongolia
  • Myanmar
  • Nepal
  • Pakistan
  • Philippines
  • Republic of Korea
  • Singapore
  • Sri Lanka
  • Taiwan
  • Tajikistan
  • Thailand
  • Timor-Leste
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • Vietnam
Fast Facts
  • 19,490 + Penn alumni located in Asia
  • 460 Penn students on average reported studying abroad annually in Asia
  • 600 + Penn faculty reporting more than 1,410 projects and activities in Asia
  • 175 active agreements with institutions in Asia

Penn's relationship with Asia strengthens the university’s commitment to meaningful global engagement. With notable concentrations of institutional partnerships, student programs, and faculty projects in East and Southeast Asia, Penn has established a strong foundation on which the university will continue to expand its global connections, deepen its global impact, and advance Penn’s preeminence as a global institution.

Lizette Grajales, CAS '19 Aravind Eye Care Systems (CASI) - Madurai, India
 
Student Voices
Wearing frog hats
GRIP, Internships Abroad
by Xiaoshen Ma, Wharton '26
Faculty Engagement
Research, Mentoring
Mapping the Mughal Empire
Ramya Sreenivasan
Deep Mapping

In the summer of 2020, Associate Professor Ramya Sreenivasan worked with four undergraduates as part of the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM) to get behind the façade of the Mughal empire (which covered much of South Asia from the 16th to the 18th century) using GIS deep mapping to ascertain how the empire was established and maintained militarily. The group’s findings illuminate how the Mughal Empire maintained itself through warfare and raise questions about Mughal military logistics -- about the transporting of men, animals, weaponry, and supplies over long distances for military campaigns. At the close of the project, the students worked with Sreenivasan on an article, which they are planning to submit to the Digital Humanities Journal.

Updated November 2020
Research
Mongolian Architecture in the 7th through 14th Centuries
Nancy Steinhardt
Architecture

Since 2013, Dr. Nancy Steinhardt, Professor, East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art of the Penn Museum, has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with the Mongolian University of Science and Technology in researching Mongolian architecture from the 7th through 14th centuries. Moreover in November 2019, Dr. Steinhardt organized the Penn Museum’s first-ever Middle-Period Mongolian Archaeology Conference, convening top experts in Mongolian archaeology from around the world to better understand Mongolian history, which has implications for our understanding of the histories of the peoples of Russia, China, Korea, and various other countries in the region.

Updated November 2020
Research
Homelessness and Housing Support Systems in the U.S. and Japan
Dennis Culhane
Housing Support

The University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice’s Dr. Culhane, a social science researcher with primary expertise in the area of homelessness and assisted housing policy, has been working with partners at Nihon Fukushi University since 2019 on a comparative study of homelessness and housing support systems in the U.S. and Japan. The purpose of this study is to reveal pathways to homelessness and assess housing support systems empirically by analyzing governmental and private data in both countries.

Updated November 2020
School Agreement
Partnership with Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan)
Matt Hartley, Alan Ruby, & Peter Eckel
Graduate School of Education

In 2010, Matt Hartley and Alan Ruby of the Graduate School of Education spearheaded a partnership between Penn GSE and Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University (NU), a newly formed research institution intended to model institutional autonomy as part of ongoing reforms. Through this partnership, Penn GSE has collaborated with colleagues at the University of Cambridge (UK) and at NU to establish NU’s Graduate School of Education (NUGSE.) Hartley and his Penn GSE colleague Peter Eckel have organized a number of exchanges, bringing Penn GSE doctoral students to NUGSE during two summers and inviting groups of NU doctoral students to Penn during successive fall semesters. 
  
Hartley and his team have ongoing academic partnerships with colleagues at NU which have produced books and journal articles on a number of topics including institutional autonomy and graduate employment opportunities.

Updated November 2020
Research
Designing the Ger of the 21st Century
William Braham
Architecture

For the last four years, William Braham (Penn Design) and a team of researchers have been working with UNICEF and Mongolian universities and non-profits to improve the energy efficiency and interior environmental quality of Mongolian ger (traditional tent dwellings which are known in Russian as “yurts”). In the first two years, Braham and his team audited ger in Mongolia and Philadelphia, building a “test ranch” of improved ger outside Ulaanbaatar in collaboration with Kieran Timberlake Architects, North Face, and Arc’teryx. The first goal was to replace coal stoves with electric heaters to reduce local pollution and reduce heating costs. In the third year, the lessons of the first two years were used to develop a package of “Cooking, Heating, and Insulation Products and Service (CHIPS) that were applied to 200 ger in Bayankhongor, Mongolia, which were successfully heated with electricity. The fourth year of research brings the CHIPS package back to Ulaanbaatar in six demonstration ger. 

The first phase of research was supported by a grant from Penn Global’s Global Engagement Fund (GEF).

Updated November 2020
Research
China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transnational Encounters
Kathryn Hellerstein
Germanic Languages and Literature; Jewish Studies

Kathryn Hellerstein, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature and Director of Penn’s Jewish Studies Program, has conducted a project that studies 120 years of cultural exchange between China and Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. In June 2017, Hellerstein launched the project with a workshop at Nanjing University for11 Jewish Studies scholars from China and the US.. In June 2018, Hellerstein convened a two-day conference at China’s Nanjing University that brought together 28 Jewish studies scholars from China, the US, Israel, and Europe. In June 2019, she and her Nanjing University partners led a pedagogical workshop on teaching Jewish Studies in China; 18 academics attended at the Penn Wharton China Center in Beijing. A volume of essays from the project, China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Exchanges, co-edited by Hellerstein and SONG Lihong, will be published by De Gruyter Press in 2022. The project is supported in part by Penn Global’s China Research and Engagement Fund (CREF).

Updated November 2020