The American Society for Premodern Asia, founded 1842 (as the AOS), promotes research in the languages and literatures of West, Central, South, and East Asia, and North Africa, incl. The American Society for Premodern Asia is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to a particular field of scholarship. The Society was founded in 1842 as the American Oriental Society, preceded only
by such distinguished organizations of general scope as the American Philosophical Society (1743), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780), and the American Antiquarian Society (1812). The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures of Asia has always been central in its tradition. This tradition has come to include such subjects as philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, paleography, epigraphy, linguistics, biography, archaeology, and the history of the intellectual and imaginative aspects of the civilizations of all parts of Asia and North Africa, especially of philosophy, religion, folklore, and art, from antiquity through the cusp of modernity.
