Dear Colleagues,

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to have been selected as the Center's new director. I thought that because I had served on the Center's executive committee at various points since arriving at IU in 1991, I had a pretty good sense of what EASC was and what its staff was doing. This was not the case, however, and the three months I have spent as director have been genuinely eye opening ones. I can honestly say that I have learned new things during each of my 12 weeks at Memorial Hall. To take one example, before I started, I thought of the Center as having an unusually congenial and hard-working core of staff members. I have learned that while this assessment is accurate as far as it goes, it does not go nearly far enough. The people I am privileged to be working with - both those who have been at EASC for years and those who have just been hired - bring very special skills and enormous energy to the myriad projects (some of which are described elsewhere in this newsletter) in which they are involved. The Center is also more varied in its activities than I had imagined. A sense of just how wide-ranging EASC activities are at present is provided by the reports and stories included in this and previous newsletters.

We have more potential to reach out in new directions both within and beyond the Bloomington campus. I hope in future newsletters to be able, via these letters from the Director and in other ways, to make clearer my thoughts about what can and should be done. If you have been able to come to either of the first two events in the 2002-3 academic year colloquium series, you have a preview of some of the paths I hope to follow in the future. These are paths that can only be followed effectively if we build new bridges between the East Asian studies community and scholars working on other parts of the world, East Asianists based in Bloomington and other parts of the Midwest, and different IU schools and departments. Thanks to the efforts of my predecessor, George Wilson, a solid foundation for creating these new bridges exists. Along with everything else I have learned, one more lesson needs to be noted: to appreciate more fully than I did before just how big a debt of gratitude all of us involved with the Center and with East Asian studies here at IU owe to George for providing the leadership he did during his tenure as Director.

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