ASIA-PACIFIC OBSERVATORY

RESEARCH PROJECTS
Island and Ocean Ecologies

After Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over Hiroshima, immediately wiping out 90 percent of ...

BioFoul

The word “biofoul” typically used to describe the accumulation of small marine organisms like algae and mussels on ship hulls, ...

Ecoambiguity

Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and ...

Island Ecology,
Island Aesthetics

In his “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” London-based Pakistani artist, curator, and critic Rasheed Araeen states, ...

Native Science

There is increasing recognition of the importance of exploring Native Science and its significance to enrich and “broaden the contemporary ...

Pacific Beneath
the Pavements

This project focuses on the scholarship of what is coming to be called “the blue humanities” concerned with oceanic ecology and ...

The Sea is Rising

Twenty years ago, the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau`ofa published his deeply influential essay “Our Sea of Islands,” arguing that the ...

Twilight Islands and Environmental Crises

In the Caribbean, small, mostly non-human inhabited spaces and biodiversity hotspots dot the horizon. Some formed thousands of years ago; ...