UEA is home to a wealth of world-leading, cutting-edge Area Studies research.

Alongside the foundational work of researchers in American Studies and Language and Communication Studies, colleagues from History, Politics, Art History and World Art Studies, Literature, the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (SRU), and International Development (Faculty of Social Science) are united by a binding interest in space and place. We share a multidisciplinary, multiregional vision of the discipline which, rooted in communities and their contexts, renegotiates the relationship between the local and the global, speaking directly to the ethical challenges of the twenty-first century. Such boundary crossing and genre blurring allows us to approach Area Studies from new directions, in which fixed geographical specificities have given way to broader thinking about social justice and intellectual endeavour in their intersectional contexts.

An exemplar of our vision for Area Studies, UEA is home to the journal New Area Studies - an online, open-access, interdisciplinary publication. Rooted in space, place and community, but moving beyond the traditional constraints of national boundaries, New Area Studies explores the local, the global, and the spaces in between. Its mission is to provide an outlet for truly interdisciplinary, field-defining scholarship. Building on the work of the community of scholars who have reinvigorated the field in recent years, it explores the ways in which our globalized world is still shaped by local issues.