This introduction argues for a comparative and global reimagination of the humanities in their intellectual, disciplinary, and larger institutional forms. We seek to expand the geographical scope and temporal depth of inquiry while challenging Eurocentric biases through the promotion of neglected traditions and their conceptual vocabularies. Crucial to the success of our “comparative global humanities” is scholarship that fully embraces the complexities and diversities of human pasts.

This essay explores the word and concept of “culture” through three temporally and geographically distinct case studies: the formation of academic anthropology in the nineteenth century, a ritual text from Bronze Age Anatolia, and an inscription from an ancient Greek religious site from the second century CE. My argument is that there is a genuine humanistic boon to be gained from collective, careful, and reflective use of concepts and that by reviving or reengaging latent histories of care itself in the vocabulary of “culture,” we can do better justice to the complex diversity of human pasts.

The concept of religion has recently become an object of strong critique. As numerous studies have argued, the very concept comes from a particular reading of a particular tradition, and the attempt to build a field of study based upon such a restricted concept has resulted in, at best, a highly ethnocentric body of knowledge and, at worst, an implicitly imperialistic one. This essay attempts to respond to such critiques by arguing that instead of rejecting the concept, we need to resurrect it by building upon the indigenous understandings that emerged in other traditions to develop a more global vision.

This essay attempts to understand the forces behind the current deadlock over globalizing academic philosophy between main-stream Western-style philosophers and its currently marginalized diversity advocates. It first pinpoints what Western-style philosophers might consider threatening or simply uninteresting in some of the major diversity paradigms (“The Same,” “The Subaltern,” “The Samaritan,” and “The Area Studies Silo”). Second, it introduces a secret weapon nobody seems to have put to use yet: metaphilosophy. It argues that we need to take a deeper historical and philological breath to redraw what and where “philosophy” has thrived in world history. Only through the detour of a global, deep-time metaphilosophy can we bring the most ingenious human thought and philosophical practice to the table as we battle over a more cosmopolitan future for academic philosophy and try to forge philosophical tools to tackle the global challenges in our world of interlocking social, spiritual, and environmental crises.

This essay aims to stay awhile with the concept of adab (proper asthetic and ethical form) before rushing to the Euro-American concept and practice of literature, which has been the translation of adab common since the late nineteenth century. Against the broader histories of this translation, I focus on the older meaning of adab in early modern Persian traditions and ask what it can show us about how texts come into being and gain meaning within its world. Texts were gifts, created and exchanged within various forms of companionship. Adab was textual form at once aesthetic and ethical. But it also had an important constitutive sociality, beyond the institutional, one unfamiliar to our contemporary understanding of literature. This lingering brings a presumed reading subject into view—a homo amicus, let us say—embedded in and concerned with social relationships. It also proposes that these generative relations provide cues for broadening our array of interpretive practices.

This essay explores the moral implications of knowledge production about the totality of the man-made world by considering the role that contingency plays in it. It builds its argument on an examination of the ancient Chinese history Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian through the lens of its reading by the Japanese writer Takeda Taijun straddling the end of WWII. Takeda’s transwar reading at once upholds Sima Qian’s humanistic undertaking of restoring intelligibility to the world to counter its ruthless contingencies but also rejects any normalization of that meaning-making endeavor. Takeda’s engagement with Records suggests that humanism should affirm the irreducible plurality of its practices originating in the human condition, on which historical contingencies inflict diverse sufferings. It calls on humanistic inquiry to open itself toward, for example, engagement with renwen—the modern term for the “humanities” across East Asian languages with roots in antiquity and two-millennia-old transregional trajectories in the region. Renwen resists easy translation into the established discourses of modern humanism, prompting us to consider what it means to expand knowledge to the historical world as a whole.

This article provides an example of the environmental humanities in action through a comparative analysis of texts describing mountains in medieval Europe and China. This case study of mountains shows how mountains have been variously associated with the sacred, fear and loathing, spiritual communion with the divine, an all-too-human mastery, or celestial transcendence. What are we to make of these conflicting sentiments across time and place? While there was never a single “Chinese” or “European” understanding of mountains, different cultures and eras had markedly divergent assumptions about them. Carving out space for the environmental humanities means recognizing that the information we seek to center was embedded into broader nexuses of knowledge, much of which may be unfamiliar to audiences today. In this article, we suggest ways environments can be appropriately addressed—and contextualized—in humanities scholarship.

This article investigates a technical and intellectual foundation of digital scholarship—digital copying—for how it might help us to think about frameworks for exploring the humanities, digital or otherwise, in comparative contexts. Two research projects are compared and contrasted to suggest how the investigation of copies and digital copying might formulate useful critical frames for global comparative humanities projects. Both projects employed the same artificial intelligence technologies, specifically deep learning tools, to copy documents from previous centuries, the Qisha canon (Qishazang 磧砂藏), a thirteen-/fourteenth-century Tripitaka produced in Southeast China, and the Capital Gazette (Hwangsŏng sinmun 皇城新聞), a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century newspaper produced on the Korean peninsula. One project was conducted with monastics at Fo Guang Shan (佛光山) Monastery in Taiwan between 2017 and 2021, and the other with the National Library of (South) Korea in 2021.

Conceptual history offers a method for writing the intellectual history of African societies that did not leave a documentary record accessible in archives. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, in this case drawing on the methods of comparative historical linguistics, it is possible to rethink the limitations of the traditional archive and privilege the intellectual work of people even when their names and the details of their individual lives have been lost to us. Through the case study of the concept of wealth in eastern Uganda over the past 2,000 years, the complexity and dynamism of people’s economic ideas becomes apparent. Also apparent is the longevity of their engagement with these concepts over at least the past two millennia. Scholars working in other contexts, including modern ones, can draw on these comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to move beyond the limitations of the archive.

This collaborative essay considers how India’s multiple, time-deep, and sophisticated literary cultures can contribute to a canon of global literary theory. Reconstructing premodern Indian literary theories of allusion and translation, we seek to bring new voices into the global discussion. The first part explores a theory of allusion in conversation with a work of Sanskrit literary theory, Ruyyaka’s Treasure of Ornaments. In the second part, the focus is on retellings of stories in the premodern Persianate world. The device of the frame story, as found in collections of animal fables like the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and the Perso-Islamic Kalila wa Dimna and in the racy tales in the Śukasaptati (Sanskrit) and Tutinama (Persian), was accompanied by one or more translator’s prefaces. These instances are viewed as examples of “metalepsis,” highlighting the self-referential structure of narrative and demarcating the boundary between the worlds of the narrator and story.

To date, most post- and decolonial responses to inequality in cultural and intellectual institutions have focused on regaining control over “theory” and epistemology. Alexander’s reflection urges us to expand the boundaries of the battleground. Diversifying content is important. But that will not do the trick if it is not accompanied by a range of other shifts in how we engage with these materials and with one another—in the institutions where we study and work, and in the disciplinary infrastructures that organize our work. To make more meaningful progress toward intellectual and cultural equality, we need to decenter how we listen, smell, feel, and touch as well as how we see. We need to decenter our pedagogical and scholarly relationships. This article lays out why that urgently matters and offer concrete suggestions for moving forward.

The field of South Asian studies, despite selective growth in the past couple of decades, urgently needs to double in size. Otherwise, it will be unable to meet an array of challenges—some long familiar to area studies, some new to the twenty-first-century world. If it cannot function as a field for the production of new knowledge, the humanities and social sciences will remain trapped by the theories and historical experience of other areas, above all Europe.

Classicists in the West today face an ongoing crisis of their field, including waning institutional support, limited positions for graduates, or political and populist misuses of the classical past. On the contrary, China has witnessed the blossoming of classical studies both Western and Chinese: not only is the number of students growing, the study of Western classics also informs the education of the country’s elites and the general public, and classics-centered curricula have recently formed the core of China’s major educational reforms. This essay suggests two practical means toward forging a global disciplinary paradigm, namely, philologically intensive translation and teaching. The cultural encounter and linguistic boundary-crossing in translation can destabilize the idea of a cultural relic as belonging exclusively to one tradition. And the teaching of the classics to a wide student body of mostly nonmajors communicates humanistic learning to the public that secures legitimacy for the humanities in a world where global cultural literacy is increasingly mandatory for people all over the world.