By Philippe Peycam

The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a third grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York to support the consolidation and institutionalization of its flagship collaborative education program ‘Humanities Across Borders’ (HaB). From building a trans-regional network of partners, to testing out-of-classroom and community embedded experiential pedagogies in HaB 1.0, in this next phase, HaB and its 18 partners in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, will mobilize institutions into a new pattern of South-South-North collaboration in higher education.

The three institutional innovations envisioned for HaB 2.0 are - i) a global consortium with its commitment to public humanist values in education; ii) a foundational curricular platform in ‘Humanities across Borders’ co-created and co-taught across the consortium’s geographies; and iii) an interactive digital platform and pedagogical resource repository, made widely accessible through partner libraries. In this way we hope to build a collaborative model of locally rooted, globally conscious, higher education that, until now, has been an aspirational ideal for many universities attempting to achieve educational justice goals. In the coming years, we will disseminate the program’s situated learning approach extensively, via the consortium’s website, publications, conferences, and other pedagogical events, and hope to encourage other institutions to join our endeavor.

I take this opportunity, on behalf of IIAS and its partners, to express our sincere gratitude to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its vision and support to HaB and its efforts in re-enchanting public humanist values among academe today.  

Philippe Peycam
Director, IIAS Leiden The Netherlands
October, 2020