In the wake of the fantastic Bibliography Among the Disciplines conference, I’ve decided to consolidate some of my thoughts on a recurring question people ask: “How can I incorporate more of (insert non-western/non-white region/place/thing here), which you study, into my teaching/work?” Here are some preliminary, slightly snarky responses.

1. The first thing you should do is what you’re trained to do: read some books. Every East Asianist I know has read books in your field. I don’t care what your field is, they’ve probably read something in your area. I saw this quite a bit at the workshop on global book history organized by Rachel Stein, Ben Nourse and Hwisang Cho. Hwisang, from Xavier University, works on 17^th century Korean epistolary culture. He was constantly throwing out references to writing and publishing practices in African American communities in the contemporary US, letter writing practices in pre-modern Yemen, and listening seriously to every perspective people brought to the table. Be like Hwisang.
2. Another way to put point 1 is to remember that Hwisang, like many in “Area studies,” has learned to look beyond her/his field for the justification of her/his work. If you are not doing this, you are in a deeply privileged field. Reject that privilege. Tear it out by its roots. You can do this by becoming a better scholar and reading some damn books. This will also help you sniff out bad scholars in area studies. If they justify their work only in terms of its importance to their area of study, don’t bother with them. The last thing you want is people who base their authority on a ‘unique’ culture or understanding. Leave that to creepy nationalists.
3. Don’t read randomly. There’s a huge amount of weird stuff in some fields. You don’t want to come out of reading about pre-modern Chinese book history talking about how irrational it was because you’ve accidentally imbibed the racist ideologies of some idiot. Your colleagues should play a role in helping you select readings. I’ve received requests from many of the awesome folks in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography for readings on Chinese book history (i.e. Liza Strakhov, Meghan Cook ). This is good for me and good for them.
4. Listen to and ask questions about the work of colleagues not working in your area. This is a major problem. I’ve seen many Europeanists lose focus as an area studies scholar tries to explain their perspectives. This is demoralizing to me (a white man from Harvard), so imagine what this does to people with less privilege (i.e. basically everyone who is not a white man from Harvard).
5. Also, don’t just talk to the white man from Harvard. We’re snarky idiots. The fact that I represent “China” in a large group of committed, interdisciplinary Europeanists is pretty messed up. I could talk about this endlessly, because it’s awful and happens too much.
6. Yes, I want to be part of these conversations, I want to go to your conferences, but I don’t want to be the only Asianist working in the room. If I am, it’s tokenism. And tokenism is really messed up. If you can’t intellectually justify the presence of scholars outside of your field and are putting them on a panel to snag a pot of money for “interdisciplinarity,” maybe you should actually try interdisciplinarity.
7. Be like Ted Porter. Now you’re wondering, Ted Porter? Isn’t he the guy who works on statistics in the modern West at UCLA?  Yes. Ted genuinely surprised me in a way no senior colleague has in ages. After he met me and two other colleagues working on China in Washington DC, he realized that our projects were interesting to the history of science. He went out of his way to organize a symposium around our work. He forced a bunch of his students working on 20^th century history of science topics to go listen. See the schedule below:

Bureaucratic Data. Knowledge Production across Science, Commerce, and the State(10.30 am – 4:00 pm, 6275 Bunche Hall)

• Maura Dykstra (Caltech), “The Legal, the Illegal, and the Un-Legal Archive in Late Imperial China.”
• Devin Fitzgerald (Harvard), “The Creation of the Qing ‘Open Archive.”
• Renee Raphael (UC Irvine), “Purposeful Bureaucratic Disorder in Philip II’s Empire?: Why Juan de Hinestrosa Thought his Relation of the Discovery of New Potosi Would Be Read.”
• Chelsea Zi Wang (Claremont McKenna), “Synchronizing Information in Premodern Bureaucracies: The Case of Imperial China.”

7. Figure out who the people who work in “area studies” departments are at your local universities. Include them in your projects if their work is good. Bryan Keene, assistant curator of manuscripts at the Getty, does this remarkably well in his courses on the Global Medieval. He makes sure experts in different fields have voices in his courses rather than attempting to teach it all on his own. As a note of caution, use your networks to check on these people before including them. As I mentioned above, area studies has long been home to weird racists. Our fields are in the process of dealing with this.
8. Don’t thoughtlessly teach the global. Consider how this impacts area specializations at your university. If you teach global, get them in on it to show the importance of collaboration across the humanities. You want their department to get new lines as much as yours. Remember, even if you’re the only “Renaissance English literature” specialist in your department (which sucks, cause it’s a huge field), there’s probably a single East Asianist/Africanist (if there’s one at all!)/South Asianist etc. responsible for everything that ever happened in that part of the world. This is absurd in ways I won’t bother to explain.

Now, I’m expecting a bit of backlash on this. I’m certain I’m wrong on many points, but I am emboldened by the commitment of all of the fellows in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography to put my perspectives in digital ink. Remember, it is hard to do this right. I fail constantly and spectacularly at using my privilege in productive ways. You will too.