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From the Director Jeffery Wasserstrom |
Dear Colleagues,
As many of you know, the first half of 2003 was exciting in many ways for the East Asian Studies Center yet disappointing in one significant regard. To dispatch with the one item of bad news first, our efforts to regain the status we had in the 1990s as a National Resource Center under Title VI did not succeed. Based on the feedback we have received, we had a competitive proposal, which is a testament to the hard work put into drafting that document by Jacques Fuqua, Benita Brown and others in Memorial Hall West, as well as many staff and faculty based elsewhere at I.U. Even so, other East Asian studies units were judged even stronger. We congratulate them on retaining or achieving NRC status, while looking forward to being in even better shape to compete with them for a place in that select company two years from now.
This is where the good news - and there is lots of it - comes in. This takes many forms, from new internal initiatives to make our already unusually robust outreach programs even stronger, to new external developments, such as the College of Arts and Sciences's renewed commitment to maintaining I.U.'s strength in international studies of all kinds. More details about these activities will be presented elsewhere in this newsletter and in later issues. For now, I will focus on just one important thing: new faculty hires. After all, the breadth and depth of East Asian faculty is a crucial measure of the strength of any university program, and I cannot remember any time since I came to I.U. in 1991 when so many scholars with East Asian expertise were arriving at the same time. Moreover, the incoming group is noteworthy not just because of its size but also because of the variety of expertise that its members cover.
The Center can take a lot of credit for two of these hires, some credit for three others, and then there are three more in which we played no role - but for which we are nonetheless grateful as a result. Funds from the Freeman Foundation facilitated the hiring of two impressive China specialists, Heidi Ross and Ethan Michelson, the first of whom is a senior scholar of Chinese education and the second a recent graduate of the University of Chicago's highly regarded sociology department. (A third Freeman-funded search, in the Business School, remains ongoing.) Hires to which the Center contributed materially, but in much more of a supporting role, include visiting positions for specialists in East Asian economics (Rick Harbaugh), Japanese anthropology (Marvin Sterling), and the cultures of mainland China and Taiwan (Sara Friedman). Then, finally, there have been three hires made recently that we feel benefit the Center and its mission greatly, but fall into the "manna from heaven" category. I am thinking here of the arrival of Gardner Bovingdon, Scott O'Bryan, and Greg Waller. Gardner, who has been hired by the Central Eurasian Studies Department because of his mastery of the history and politics of Xinjiang, is well-versed in and concerned with many other aspects of Chinese studies as well. Scott is a specialist in the history of post-War Japan whose hire was the happy result of a successful collaborative search carried out by EALC and the Department of History. And Greg, a specialist in the history of U.S. cinema who is involved in a long-term study of visual representations of Japan, was hired via the Department of Communication and Culture's search for a new chair.
In a "Letter from the Director," even an unusually long one like this has turned out to be, all that I can do is mention names and areas of specialization. One of the things to which I am looking forward this year, though, is that I will have many opportunities to carry out more meaningful introductions. And one way I will do this is via the East Asian Colloquium series, in which, as you will see from our schedule, many of those whose names I have mentioned above will be participating. This is a fitting way of showing that new hires not only greatly benefit our students, they also do many other things to enrich the East Asian Studies community and I.U.
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Last updated: 11/14/2003
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/newsletter/
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