Alliance for Research on East Asia (AREA) Ruhr
AREA Ruhr is a joint research and teaching alliance of the Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr University Bochum and the Institute of East Asian Studies (IN-EAST), University of Duisburg-Essen, within the greater University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr). Facilitating collaborative research and teaching, with about 20 professors and 100 researchers and more than 1600 students, AREA Ruhr has become one of Europe’s largest research and teaching hubs in the field of East Asian Studies. It brings together a wide range of scholarly fields and disciplines, ranging from historical to contemporary research, from linguistics to economics, from religious studies to sociology and political science. AREA Ruhr thus creates a unique interdisciplinary research and teaching environment for the study of East Asia.
East Asian Studies in the Ruhr Region
Established in 1994 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, IN-EAST is Germany’s largest institute for social science research on contemporary East Asia, with research and teaching focusing on the economies, politics and societies of China, Japan and Korea.
The Faculty of East Asian Studies was one of the founding faculties of the Ruhr University Bochum in 1965. Here, research and teaching both focus on China, Japan and Korea and they explore the fields of history, linguistics, literature, philology, philosophy, political economy, and religion.
Cooperations
The cooperation within AREA Ruhr is coordinated by its Governing Board, which is chaired by two co-directors. AREA Ruhr also profits greatly from the support offered by the members of its Scientific Advisory Board, which is comprised of internationally distinguished scholars in the field of East Asian studies.
Both IN-EAST and the Faculty of East Asian Studies offer a broad range of BA and MA programs. We believe that sound language skills are vital for the academic study of East Asia. Our programs thus provide comprehensive and in-depth tuition in modern and pre-modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In recent years, IN-EAST has successfully offered doctoral and post-doctoral research in the DFG-sponsored Research Training Group Risk and East Asia and the BMBF-funded IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies – the latter of which focussed on innovation in East Asia. Doctoral students at the Faculty of East Asian Studies are integrated with the RUB Research School.
In October 2023, AREA Ruhr started its DFG-funded Research Training Group on East Asian Futures: Visions and Realizations on National, Transregional and Global Scales (GRK 2833). Before, AREA Ruhr already successfully offered joint doctoral research and training in the MERCUR-sponsored program on Transnational Institution Building and Transnational Identities in East Asia from 2017 to 2022.
University Alliance Ruhr
AREA Ruhr is a member of the University Alliance Ruhr. Since 2007, the UA Ruhr facilitates strategic cooperation between the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Ruhr-University of Bochum, and the TU Dortmund University, consolidating resources as well as research and teaching activities. Following the motto “Three universities – One community – Endless opportunities”, UA Ruhr has facilitated the creation of a large number of cooperative projects in the areas of research, teaching, and administration. With more than 120,000 students and 14,000 researchers, UA Ruhr is one of the largest and strongest academic alliances in Germany. Under the umbrella of the newly founded Research Alliance Ruhr UA Ruhr bundles its top international research in four research centers and one college.
In the context of UA Ruhr, students from the Faculty of East Asian Studies (RUB) have the opportunity to
take classes at the IN-EAST (UDE) and vice versa.