The Items archive contains a wide range of essays on the evolution of area studies in the United States. Here, Bryce Wood reports on a major 1953 conference at Princeton University that played a role the development of African studies, bringing together a wide range of actors soon to have major influence on the establishment of that interdisciplinary field. It was cosponsored by the National Research Council and supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which now funds two of the SSRC’s most significant programs in Africa, albeit with a focus on social scientists in Africa—Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa and the African Peacebuilding Network.

In this 2006 essay from the Items archive, Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault examine the social history out of which the November 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris (and across France) arose. In their analysis, they discuss the use of colonial era laws and broader parallels with overseas French colonial rule that constitute a form of internal colonialism with regard to migrant communities in France itself. The parallels with N. D. B. Connolly’s new essay on the contemporary relevance Robert Allen are clear—i.e., one way of understanding racial and ethnic marginalization and discrimination (in the United States or France) is through the lens of colonial relations and structures.

Simon Reid-Henry’s essay refers to Simon Kuznets’s classic work in the 1950s on economic development and inequality. At that time, Kuznets was founding chair of the SSRC’s Committee on Economic Growth, an extraordinarily productive interdisciplinary panel that over a twenty-year period forged new ways of measuring national income and wealth, its distribution within countries, and comparisons across them. In this 1955 archival essay, Kuznets, who had been a research fellow at the Council in the 1920s and went on to win the 1971 Nobel Prize in economics, lays out the core agenda for the committee’s work.

Connected to many of the issues raised in the essay by Shami and Miller-Idriss, this 1993 essay from the archives provides a glimpse of an earlier moment in the reimagining of international and area studies. Timothy Mitchell and Lila Abu-Lughod described the rich discussion and debate that unfolded at an SSRC-sponsored conference held in Cairo designed to create dialogues between scholars of the Middle East and South Asia. A quite extraordinary group focused on the history and legacy of the “tradition-modernity” dualism, and how to best learn from the range of then-current critiques of what had become the dominant frame for understanding the (post)colonial world.