American Society for Premodern Asia (ASPA)

The American Society for Premodern Asia (ASPA) (formerly known as the American Oriental Society - AOS) is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to a particular field of scholarship. The Society was founded in 1842, 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). From the beginning its aims have been humanistic. The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures of West, Central, South, and East 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 these civilizations, especially of philosophy, religion, folklore, and art.

ASPA does not have an institutional membership category. The UCLA Library has an institutional subscription to the Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia (JASPA, formerly JAOS).