Faculty Notes

Chris Beckwith (CEUS) recently published Koguryo, the Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives: An Introduction to the Historical-comparative Study of the Japanese-Koguryoic Languages, With a Preliminary Description of Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese, Leiden: Brill, 2004, 300 pages. He has also received a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad fellowship to write a book on historical problems connected to the Koguryo relationship to Japanese, which he is doing in Tokyo this year. Further, Professor Beckwith received a Guggenheim fellowship to write a history of Central Eurasia, focusing on the Early Central Eurasian Culture Complex.

Scott Kennedy (EALC) published “Holey Protectionism!,” China Economic Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3 (Third Quarter, 2003), pp. 24-28.

Yoshihisa Kitagawa (LING) presented his research entitled “Prosodic Influences on Syntactic Judgments” with Janet Den Fodor (from CUNY Graduate Center) at Empirische Fundierung der Modellbildung in der Syntax, Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, (Empirical Foundations of Model-building in the Syntax, German Society of Linguistics), Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz in February 2004. His trip to Germany was supported in part by a travel grant from EASC. Professor Kitagawa published the following two articles this past summer with Satoshi Tomioka “Masked Island Effects in Japanese,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics I - MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 46, pp. 315-329, with Dorian Roehrs and Satoshi Tomioka, “Multiple Wh-interpretations,” Generative Grammar in a Broader Perspective - Proceedings of GLOW in Asia 2003, pp. 209-233.

Scott O’Bryan (EALC & HIST) traveled in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during May 2004 to do research on the history of environmentalism in modern Japan and as part of his development of a new course on modern history as seen through the history of Hiroshima. He is also preparing an article manuscript called “The Club of Rome, Dystopias of Growth, and Japanese Environmentalism” for submission to the journal Environmental History. This fall Professor O’Bryan is teaching two new courses: “Cultural History of the Good Life in Modern Japan” and “Empire in Modern East Asia.”

Heidi Ross (EDUC) spent one month this summer conducting research in Shaanxi Province and Beijing Municipality. In Beijing Ross worked with Li Yiru, retired principal of the Beijing Hua Xia Girls’ Academy, to design a questionnaire for a network of 40 principals who administer China’s all-girls’ academic secondary schools. She also began organizing school visits for Indiana University undergraduates who will be traveling to Japan and China next May as part of the Spring 2005 study tour course, "Educational Reform in China and Japan," that Ross will be team teaching with Professor Richard Rubinger in EALC.

In Shaanxi, Ross collaborated with two colleagues on a Ford Foundation project on Chinese private higher education. As a delegation member from a San Franciso-based NGO, the 1990 Institute, Ross also participated in two mass primary school graduation ceremonies for 1,000 “spring bud” girls in the cities of Shangluo and Ankang. The spring bud program, the largest of its kind in China, has supported the girls’ schooling since third grade and will continue to do so as they begin their middle school studies. This program has generated a rich "data set" of information, including household, health, and nutrition surveys, school achievement data, teacher assessments, and student essays, assignments, and letters. Ross will collaborate with the Shaanxi Women’s Federation to begin a longitudinal study to answer whether, how, and in what ways schooling improves the girls’ lives and futures (and by extension the lives and futures of their family members and communities).

Lynn Struve (EALC) presented her paper “Confucian PTSD: Reading Trauma in a Chinese Youngster’s Memoir of 1653” at the biennial conference of the European Association of China Scholars in Heidelberg, Germnay in late August. This paper will be published this fall in a thematic issue of the journal History & Memory on “Traumatic Memory in Chinese History,” for which Struve served as principal editor. The fall 2004 issue of Late Imperial China will also feature an article by Struve, “Ruling from Sedan Chair: Wei Yijie and the Civil Examination Reforms of the ’Oboi’ Regency.” In addition, a book that she has edited, The Qing Formation in World-historical Time, will be released shortly in the monograph series of the Harvard University Asia Center. It contains Struve’s introduction as well as her article “Chimerical Early Modernity: The Case of ‘Conquest-Generation’ Memoirs.”

Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC & LING) conducted research at Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo in Japan in May investigating children’s acquisition patterns of mimetic words in Japanese. This research was made possible by a grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. In July, she finished editing a three-volume series entitled Japanese Linguistics, the Routledge Library Modern Japan Series, which will be published in the spring of 2005.

Jeff Wasserstrom (EALC & HIST) has recently published several short pieces on issues in Chinese studies, including a look at the perils of predicting the future of the Communist regime (“Will the Party Never End?”), which ran in July in the Australian Financial Review, and a look at changing patterns of intellectual debate and dissent in the PRC (“Reading China”), which ran in the Summer issue of the Boston Review. In July he gave an invited talk at Sophia University in Tokyo on his ongoing Shanghai project, and at the end of October, he will set off for Taiwan to give a series of talks at several Taipei universities and institutes. His article on “The Boxer Crisis” will appear this month in Taming Terrorism: It’s Been Done Before, which Anna Reid is editing for Policy Exchange, a British think tank. In addition to these activities, he continues to write very short and medium-length reviews on a fairly regular basis for Newsweek’s international editions.

Yasuko Ito Watt (EALC) gave a lecture on the articulation of Japanese language education between secondary schools and colleges and universities at the Japan Foundation in London on May 15, 2004. She was invited by the British Association of Teachers of Japanese (BATJ) and the Japan Foundation in London.

In other faculty/staff news.

The EASC welcomes new members: Joe Hoffman (LAW), Nicholas Cullather (HIST), Greg Waller (CMCL), Marc Dollinger (BUS), James Nakagawa (FINA), Rick Harbaugh (BUS), Gardner Bovingdon (CEUS), and Sarah Friedman (GNDR) as well as new associate members: Jacques Fuqua (EASC), Anne Prescott (EASC), Liana Zhou (Kinsey), Judy Stubbs (Art Museum), Shawn Reynolds (Int’l Resource Center), Yoshiko Green (Foreign Languages, IU-SB), and Jian Liu (Library).

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