Call for Papers: Architectural Histories of Maritime Asia
Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference
April 9-13, 2014 Austin, TX

Long-distance maritime travel and trade have connected coastal societies for millennia, and nowhere is this borne out in the longue duree more strongly than in the network of seas, bordering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, that connect the coastal regions of southern Arabia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Historians have long explored the rich and deep maritime connections in different parts of the world that preceded the advent of European imperialism and the “modern” world. Their works reveal the limits of a historiography that is premised on a continental conception of the world, i.e. a world divided according to the principle of land masses. With perhaps a few rare exceptions, the architectural and urban historiography of Asia has not adequately addressed the spatial connectedness–linking regions separated by area studies specializations–and temporal depth–from pre-colonial to the post-colonial contemporary world–that the study of maritime connections in Asia offers. For example, vernacular architecture studies in Asia tend to assume vernacular architecture as a timeless, geographically bounded entity and ignore the dynamic influences of broader maritime networks. Although studies in colonial architecture in Asia have been attentive to how extra-local colonial networks shaped the colonial architecture of a place, they have been silent on the influences of “indigenous” maritime connections.

This session seeks to address these oversights. We welcome situated
architectural studies covering any time period on any sites in maritime
Asia. Papers should foreground how the dynamic interactions across maritime
Asia influenced architectural and urban cultures. This emphasis on
connections and interactions is aimed at questioning existing
classifications that assume geographically bounded and temporally static
Asian architectural traditions and cultures.

Session chairs: Imran bin Tajudeen, National University of Singapore,
imran.tjdn@gmail.com; and Jiat-Hwee Chang, National University of
Singapore, jiathwee@gmail.com.

To submit an abstract, please see instructions on conference website —
http://www.sah.org/conferences-and-programs/2014-conference—austin