EASC Newsletter

In this issue, October 2005

Notes from the Director

Jeff Wasserstrom

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back to a new semester!

The 2005-06 academic year has begun with a flurry of East Asia-related activities here at IU. In recent months we have welcomed several new staff members to the Center (including Margaret Key, who started as Associate Director at the end of the spring, and Nancy Alexander, who came on board as database/webpage/office coordinator at the end of the summer); celebrated the arrival of new East Asianist faculty to the campus (China specialist Ho-fung Hung in Sociology, modern Japanese literature specialist Michiko Suzuki in East Asian Languages and Cultures); held a workshop on the history and legacies of the Japanese Empire; and begun preparation of a major grant proposal, in an effort to regain our position as a comprehensive National Resource Center under the Federal Government's Title VI program. More details on these and other things are provided elsewhere in this newsletter, but I want to spend a little time here mentioning one other very special development that has gotten fully underway this semester: the launching of the IL/IN East Asia Initiative, a joint effort between EASC and our counterpart at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

About six months ago, East Asianists from the two campuses began to talk about ways to collaborate in the future, so as to make the most of the many ways in which our two programs are complementary. The more we have talked, the more we have come to appreciate just how special the collections of scholars at each campus are, the more enthusiastic we have all become about what we can accomplish together. We will be applying to Title VI as a consortium, but the plans for collaboration go far beyond this – and indeed our working together has already gone well beyond the planning stage, as faculty from UIUC contributed important things to our Japanese empire workshop and several faculty from IU have taken part in, or soon will take part in, panels held in Urbana-Champaign.

Information about our collaboration will be provided on the websites of both centers and in our newsletters, so keep an eye out for how this new initiative develops. Among its special components are the facts that each campus has ethnographers working on China, Japan and Korea, each campus has strong faculty and student interest in East Asian education, and each campus has an active Korean studies program. Strengths such as these (and there are many others), as well as the impressive outreach records of both centers, provide our new consortium with a very solid foundation on which to build, and the fact that some faculty on each campus have worked together in the past in various ways is a big added plus.

The recent expansion of East Asian studies at IU (via such things as recent hires into departments and schools that previously lacked specialists in the study of China, Japan and Korea) has generated excitement in the past couple of years. I am confident that this pattern will continue, thanks to additional hires, new programs, and above all this new venture to join together with UIUC.

Best wishes,

Jeff

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

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