EASC Newsletter: October 2005 EASC Newsletter: 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
Michael Robinson led a special seminar at Stanford University from June 27 to July 1 for the Journal of Korean Studies. This seminar was the result of an open call for papers on the general topic of the globalization of South Korean society. Five papers were chosen from thirty applicants for discussion, revision, and submission to the journal as a “special issue” to be published in the spring of 2006. Robinson reports that this seminar was among the most satisfying experiences of his entire academic career. It was a chance to work intensively with highly motivated young scholars to produce publishable papers drawn from Ph.D.and post-graduate research. The papers covered a diverse range of topics: the commodification of Korean Shaman ritual for national marketing during the World Cup, the feminization of the World Cup crowd, the scientization of Korean herbal medicine, global cable networks and the marketing of the Korean nation, and the interplay of global forces and family law reform in contemporary Korea.All the papers have been revised and resubmitted for external review.
Dick Rubinger (EALC), Heidi Ross (EDUC), and graduate assistant Lijing Yang (EDUC) accompanied fifteen undergraduate students on a very successful study tour to Japan and China in May. The trip, supported by the Freeman Foundation Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative at IU, was part of the team-taught course Education Reform in China and Japan that brought together students from EALC and the School of Education. They spent eight days in each country visiting schools and hearing talks from education professionals on the state of education reform in East Asia. In Japan, students observed curricular reforms in a variety of schools in Tokyo and Tochigi Prefecture and in China were impressed by the stark disperity in educational provision between wealthy Beijing schools and struggling rural schools in nearby Hebei Province. At the end of the tour, each student submitted a comparative report on one aspect of educational reform in China and Japan and presented these findings in front of an audience of comparative education doctoral students at Tsinghua University in Beijing.The tour was rewarding both because of what it revealed about educational reform in each country (the significant gap, for instance, between national reform policies and on-the-ground practice) and because it cast a strong light on the fundamental differences in how the two countries approach educational reform.
Heidi Ross traveled to China twice this summer. In May she and Dick Rubinger accompanied a group of undergraduates on a study tour of educational reform in Japan and China (see previous report). After the tour, Ross stayed on in China to assist Dr. Laura Stachowski, Director of the School of Education's award-winning Cultural Immersion Projects, in setting up a teaching opportunity for IU graduates in Shandong Province (see following report).
Ross returned to China in mid-June to travel to Xian, Shaanxi to work with colleagues on a Ford Foundation initiative examining the challenges faced by administrators and teachers at China's private colleges and universities. As China's system of higher education shifts from an elite to mass enterprise, private university faculty are struggling to engage disinterested students and balance heavy teaching loads with demands for research productivity.
After completing the Ford Foundation project in Xian, Ross, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral student Jingjing Lou, and Batchelor Middle School social studies teacher Becky Boyle traveled to Dan Feng County in Shangluo, Shaanxi to begin a Pathways to Peace research project. The project is designed to support three interlinked activities: facilitating short-term exchanges of middle-school teachers between Bloomington, Indiana and Shangluo, China; engaging Chinese and American middle-school students and their teachers in an interactive activity to enhance global understanding and collaborative learning for peace; and creating virtual and real "sharing our voices" exhibitions of Chinese and American middle-school students' photography and essays. Ross and another Educational Leadership and Policy Studies doctoral student, Lei Wang, will return to Dan Feng County in late October to continue the project. During that trip Ross will also participate in a UNICEF-sponsored "First International Forum on Children's Development" in Beijing. Ross is looking forward to her first meeting at the Great Hall of the People, the conference venue.
The Shandong city of Zibo is now a placement site for IU Teacher Education majors wishing to complete a portion of their student teaching in an overseas location. Since the early 1970s, the Cultural Immersion Projects in the School of Education have provided opportunities for pre-service teachers to teach,live,and learn in culturally different settings, thus expanding their perspectives on how others view the world, educate their children, and carry out their daily tasks of life. Through school and community-based experiences and structured reports requiring the identification of new learning and related insights, thousands of beginning teachers have demonstrated that such opportunities can broaden the worldview they bring to their own classrooms, thus impacting the youth in their elementary and secondary classrooms for years to come.
In May Laura Stachowski, Director of the Cultural Immersion Projects, visited several schools in China and met with groups of teachers who were strongly committed to hosting student teachers from the U.S. who could provide support for the development of Chinese pupils' conversational English skills, teach in various subject areas, and become involved in the schools' extracurricular programs. Since then, Stachowski has received approval from IU's Overseas Study Advisory Council to include China as a Cultural Projects option, and efforts are now underway to advertise this exciting new opportunity in the School of Education.
Stachowski notes that there are key individuals and groups who made this new program possible. Heidi Ross, on the faculty in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, and her graduate assistant Lijing Yang were instrumental in identifying schools, arranging the itinerary, and traveling with Stachowski to Zibo for the school visits and meetings. Mrs.Yanju Wei, of the Zibo Educational Department, now serves as the “placement consultant” for IU student teachers coming to Shandong. And finally, the EASC's financial support, with funding from the Freeman Foundation, greatly facilitated the development of this new option in the Cultural Immersion Projects. Stachowski thanks all of these individuals and groups for their significant contributions to the success of this endeavor.
China is the twelfth host nation offered through the Cultural Projects, joining Australia, Costa Rica, England, India, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, Russia, Scotland, Spain, and Wales, as well as locations across the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Although designed for Teacher Education majors, international placements in the Cultural Projects are also open to non-education majors who are interested in seeking “school internships” abroad. Contact Laura Stachowski for more information (Education 1044; 856-8507; stachows@indiana.edu).
Robert F. Campany (REL) published four articles in 2005:
“Eating Better than Gods and Ancestors.” Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China, ed. Roel Sterckx, Palgrave Press.
“The Meanings of Cuisines of Transcendence in Late Classical and Early Medieval China.” T'oung Pao 91:126-182.
“Long-Distance Specialists in Early Medieval China.” Literature, Religion, and East-West Comparison: Essays in Honor of Anthony C. Yu, ed. Eric Ziolkowski, University of Delaware Press, 109-124.
“Living off the Books: Fifty Ways to Dodge Ming? [Preallotted Lifespan] in Early Medieval China.” The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture, ed.Christopher Lupke, University of Hawai'i Press, 129-150.
In April Campany was one of four speakers chosen to speak at a symposium honoring Professor Anthony C. Yu on the occasion of his retirement. He delivered a talk titled "Locative and Utopian in China: Redescribing the Quest for Transcendence and Rectifying the Categories of Description.”
In May Campany delivered papers at two workshops at Harvard University. One workshop was on the Eastern Jin dynasty; his paper was an interpretation of the religious thought of two early Eastern Jin authors, Gan Bao and Ge Hong. The other workshop was on the problems and possibilities involved in applying the concept of "religion" to the study of China; his paper was a reflection on this problem as it applies to the interpretation of religious traditions in the early medieval period in China.
Campany recently took on the duties of Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and will continue to serve as co-editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions until the spring of 2006.
Roger L. Janelli (FOLK) delivered the paper “Traditions and Korea's Market Economy” at a conference marking the centennial of the founding of Korea University (Seoul). Also, at the 2005 meeting of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe, held at Sheffield University, he jointly delivered, along with Dawnhee Yim, the keynote address, “The Cyberspace Frontier in Korean studies”.
Sumie Jones (EALC/CMLT) published three articles in 2005:
“Edo no Gesaku to Amerika” (Edo-Style Gesaku and America), a discussion with Haruko Iwasaki and Adam Kern, in “Edo Bunka to Sabukarucha,” special issue, Kokubungaku Kaishaku to Kansho, (January).
"Shunbon o Yomu Watakushi-tachi" (We Readers of Erotic Fiction), featured article, Kokubungaku Kaishaku to Kansho 70, no. 8 (August): 10-20.
"Making the Most of the Breach in the Dike: Accommodations of Cultural Studies to East Asian Comparative Literature," in “Intercultural Explorations,” ed. Eugene Eoyang, special issue, Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature 32: 29-37.
Sumie Jones also received a matching grant of $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to supplement a grant for her project, "Early Modern Japanese Literature: Research and Translation," 2003-2007.
Scott Kennedy's (EALC/POLS) new publication, The Business of Lobbying in China (Harvard University Press, 2005), documents the rising influence of business, both Chinese and foreign, on national public policy in China.
Kennedy also recently published the following articles:
"China's Porous Protectionism: The Changing Political Economy of Trade Policy." Political Science Quarterly 120, no.3 (Fall 2005): 407-432.
“Barbarians Lobbying at the Gate,” Financial Times, September 28, 2005. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/88071e90-2fbb-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html.
Hyo Sang Lee (EALC) presented a paper titled "Cognition, Discourse-pragmatics, and Conversational Usages: With Reference to Verbal Connective - nuntey in Korean" at the 9 th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC 2005) held July 17-24 at Yonsei University in Korea. He also presented an invited paper titled "Topic Marking as a Framing Strategy: An Interplay of Semantics and Pragmatics" at the Workshop on Topicalization at the Annual Summer Conference of the Linguistic Society of Korea, held July 25 at Sogang University in Korea.
Lee has been invited to give a talk on teaching Korean grammar as a foreign language at the 7th International Conference on Korean Language Education as a Foreign Language to be held October 28 at Seoul National University. He has also been elected to serve a three-year term as an executive board member for the American Association of Teachers of Korean (AATK). This is the second time he has been elected as a board member, having also served from 1997 to 2000.
In May 2005, co-authoring with Professor Sungdai Cho (SUNY Binghamton) and Professor Hye-Sook Wang ( Brown University), Lee published two fifth-year Korean textbooks, Integrated Korean: High Advanced 1 & 2 ( University of Hawai'i Press).
Eun-Hee Lee, former AI and lecturer of Korean language at IU, is now a tenure-track assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo.
Jennifer Liu (EALC) was elected Vice President of the Chinese Language Teachers Association.
Mike Robinson (EALC) is now serving on the Association for Asian Studies Program Committee for a two-year term, from 2005 to 2007.
Edith Sarra (EALC) presented the paper “What Women Want is Womanly Men: The Destiny of Romance After Genji” as part of a panel on homosociality and homoeroticism in classical Japanese literature at the 11th annual conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies, held in Vienna.
Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC) edited and wrote the introduction to a three-volume set published last spring by the Routledge Library of Modern Japan, Japanese Linguistics: Critical Concepts: vol.1, Phonology and Morphology; vol.2, Syntax and Semantics; vol.3, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, and Language Contact.
Tsujimura presented a paper titled "Mimetic Verbs and Innovative Verbs in the Acquisition of Japanese” at the Berkeley Linguistic Society, UC Berkeley, on February 18-20. She was a guest lecturer in Professor Julie Auger's Topics course Language and Gender on March 23 and talked about honorifics and gender differences in Japanese.
In May she traveled to Japan to conduct preliminary research on rhyming in Japanese hip-hop music at Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujo. In October she will present a paper on Japanese hip-hop music with Kyoko Okamura (Ph.D. Linguistics) and Stuart Davis (Linguistics) at the University of Wisconsin.
This summer a professional development grant from EASC made it possible for her to develop, along with two of her AIs, Kyoko Okamura (Ph.D. Linguistics) and Tamiji Muto (completed M.A. in Education), instructional materials using the film Shall We Dance? for fourth-year Japanese language courses (J401-J402).
Jeff Wasserstrom (HIST/EALC) recently gave several invited talks. In July he gave a lecture on Shanghai landmarks at the Australia National University and a lecture on representations of Shanghai at the University of Sydney. In September he gave a lecture on "War and Terror at the Turn of Two Centuries: The Boxer Crisis Revisited" at Academia Sinica in Taipei.
His most recent publication is an essay that places the Chinese anti-Japanese protests of earlier this year into historical perspective. A short version of it appeared on the History News Network website, while a longer version came out in the summer issue of the World Policy Journal.
Yasuko Ito Watt (EALC) served as the Program Chair of the annual ATJ (Association of Teachers of Japanese) Seminar held in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies meeting on March 31.
She presented the paper "Classical Japanese in Modern Texts" at the 11th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum on May 9 at Princeton University. She also gave the paper, "Using Anime and Manga to Motivate Students," as the keynote speaker at the Mid-Atlantic Japanese Language Teacher Workshop in Elizabethtown College, PA on May 14.
George Wilson (Emeritus, HIST & EALC) will be a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, teaching recent Japanese history in place of Leslie Pincus (on leave in Kyoto) beginning in January 2006. This visiting appointment follows last spring's teaching job at the University of Kentucky.
Jiacheng Zhang, a visiting scholar with International Programs, will be affiliated with EALC this fall semester. As an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Chinese Ideology and Culture Research Institute at Zhejiang University, he will work with the EALC faculty in Chinese thought and religion, especially Steve Bokenkamp and Bob Eno.
Yoonhee Chang (Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology and minor in EALC) has been awarded the 2005-06 SOFOKS Graduate Fellowship in Korean Language and Culture for her work on Korean traditional music.
Hillary Demmon (B.A. in EALC) has been awarded the Chinese Cultural Scholarship for a year of study at Beijing Language and Culture University. She also received a travel grant from the Hutton Honors College's International Experiences Program.
Bill Farge (Ph.D. in EALC) is an alumnus who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans. Several people from the EASC community tried to contact him following the Katrina hurricane but were unable to reach him. If anyone has any contact information or news of his situation, please contact the EASC Newsletter Editor.
Kyoim Yun (Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology and minor in EALC) was awarded a fellowship from the Korean Studies Program at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Stanford Institute for International Studies. She participated in the Stanford Summer Workshop on Korea from June 27 to July 1. She is teaching at IUPUI in the Department of Anthropology for the 2005-06 academic year as a faculty teaching fellow. She will present the paper “Manipulating the Gods with Injeong (monetary offering)” at the American Folklore Society's annual meeting this October.
Jeeyoung Shin (Ph.D. in Communication and Culture with a minor in East Asian Studies) was awarded the Five College ABD Fellowship at Amherst College and is a resident fellow at Amherst for the 2005-06 academic year while finishing her dissertation on Korean cinema. She will present the paper "Rethinking Media Globalization through the Rise of New Korean Cinema" at the Global Fusion 2005 Conference, September 30-October 2 at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
Greg Johnson (Ph.D. in EALC) is an assistant professor of comparative culture at Otsuma Women's University inTokyo. He presented the paper "Between Oral History and Oral Tradition: Performances of Japanese War Experience Narratives" at the Japan Oral History Association's annual conference on September 18 at Kyoto University.
Michael Stanley-Baker (M.A. in Chinese) is teaching "Religions in Asia" this semester for the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Religious Studies. He will present a paper based on his thesis at the Association for Asian Studies/MAR regional conference in Pittsburgh this October.
EASC Executive Committee election and role
Many in the EASC community may not be aware that there is an EASC Executive Committee made up of EASC faculty. The role of the EASC Executive Committee is to “advise the EASC Director, serve as conduits to convey faculty suggestions and concerns, and help ensure that Center programs grow in ways that reflect basic program priorities” (from the EASC Constitution).
This fall Sara Friedman (ANTH/GNDR) was elected to serve a two-year term on the Committee. The other members are Tom Keirstead (EALC/HIST) and Heidi Ross (EDUC) who each have one more year to serve, as well as the Director of EASC, Jeff Wasserstrom, the Chair of EALC, Bob Eno, and the Associate Director of EASC, Margaret Key (non-voting member).
IL/IN East Asia Initiative
As mentioned by Jeff Wasserstrom in his Notes from the Director, the EASC has entered into an exciting new relationship with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (EAPS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This partnership, called the IL/IN East Asia Initiative, will dramatically raise the profile of East Asian studies at both universities as faculty share resources, engage in cross-campus teaching, and find new opportunities to interact with and guide graduate students on both campuses. The synergies created by this partnership will result in the largest Korean studies program in the Midwest, as well as remarkable national strengths in East Asian ethnography, East Asian education, and East Asian sexuality and gender, and will multiply the impact of each university's individual offerings.
Cross-campus scholarly exchanges have already begun. In September, Sheena Choi, Sara Friedman, Heidi Ross and Dick Rubinger of IU participated in a UIUC panel, Educational Transformation in East Asia. Nancy Abelmann and Poshek Fu of UIUC participated in the Japanese Empire: Gone, But Not Forgotten workshop at IU. And on November 4, IU's Michicko Suzuki will present the paper “Female Same-Sex Love in Prewar Japan: Yoshiya Nobuko and Sexology Discourse” at UIUC's Asia Pacific Queer Workshop.
Follow these links to the UIUC webpage on the IL/IN East Asia Initiative and to UIUC's East Asian Faculty roster.
Japanese Empire: Gone, But Not Forgotten workshop
This two-day workshop was a project of the IU Committee on Asian Security and was coordinated through the IL/IN East Asia Initiative. The event was made possible by major support from IU's Office of the Vice President for Research and the Freeman Foundation, with additional support from the departments of EALC, History, Studio Arts, and Art History, the College of Arts and Sciences, and Butler University.
Day One focused on regional security issues and nationalism. The keynote speaker was Mark Selden of Cornell University, whose talk was titled “The Asia-Pacific in an Age of Global Insecurity.” Day Two dealt with memory issues and the process of coming to terms, or not, with old and new wounds. The second day included a talk by Takashi Yoshida (University of Western Michigan) on film and teaching about the Japanese empire. He showed a video with very interesting footage of propaganda from Japan and the U.S., a copy of which is available in the EASC video library. The workshop concluded with EASC's first Colloquium speaker, Julia Adeney-Thomas, whose talk, “Landscape's Mediation between History and Memory: A Visual Turn in Japan's Approach to its Wartime Past,” focused on the successful way that the Yokohama Museum of Art circumnavigated the current tensions between history and memory in its recent exhibition of paintings and photographs.
Visiting scholar presents lecture on “cell phone poetry”
On September 6, Mutsumi Kato, visiting from Rikkyo University in Tokyo, delivered the lecture “Cell Phone Poetry and Internet Culture in Japan.” Kato analyzed some examples of contemporary tanka, a genre of Japanese poetry composed of 5-7-5-7-7 syllable phrases, that were winning entries in a weekly radio contest in which poets submit their tanka as text messages via cell phone. After introducing tanka as a poetic form, Kato showed several television commercials for cell phone service and discussed how cell phone companies sentimentalize cell phone use by marketing it as a means of expressing feelings to loved ones. He then discussed classical elements in the contest-winning tanka as well as the ways in which they subvert traditional poetic conventions.
Study tour to Korea and Japan
Nineteen middle-school and high-school teachers from Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Alabama who completed the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia's (NCTA) Teaching about Asia seminar traveled to Korea and Japan for twenty days this summer. They were accompanied by tour leader Anne Prescott (EASC Outreach Coordinator), tour assistant Mayumi Hoshino (graduate student in History), faculty expert Mike Robinson (Professor, EALC), and curriculum coordinator John Frank (U.S. History, Center Grove High School, Greenwood, Indiana).
EASC's study tours are designed to give teachers the opportunity to visit historical and cultural sites as well as local schools. Among the most popular stops were the Confucian Institute at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, the Middle School and High School for Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul, the DMZ, Himeji Castle, Hiroshima Peace Museum, a baseball game in Osaka, the Kofu Minami High School koto club rehearsal in Kofu, and Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.
Prior to departure the teachers completed a lengthy reading list and came to the IU Bloomington campus for a two-day orientation. Upon their return to the United States, the teachers developed lesson plans to implement in their classrooms as well as outreach strategies for their local communities. In October the group will gather again in Bloomington to discuss their experiences and how to strengthen teaching about East Asia in their schools.
National Clearinghouse for U.S.-Japan Studies publications
The National Clearinghouse for U.S.-Japan Studies announces its publications for 2005. Two new Japan Digests ("Japan in the U.S. Press: Bias and Stereotypes" and "Japan and World War II: The Legacy Six Decades Later") join a thoroughly revised and updated "Japanese Education" by Lucien Ellington. The four new Internet Guides for the year are: "Pacific War: Lessons and Sources," "Japan's Territorial Disputes," "Japanese Remembrances of World War II," and a guide on the environment. The four new Japan Bibliographies are: "Resources for Teaching about Japanese Art," "Manga and Anime: Focus on Youth Audiences," "U.S. Stereotypes of Japan," and "Geisha."
All these publications will be available for free and in a variety of formats by October 1 at the Clearinghouse website.The website is updated frequently with news headlines, announcements, and links to interesting sites and sources about Japan. You can sign up for a monthly e-newsletter by sending an email to japan@indiana.edu.
Anne Prescott (EASC Outreach Coordinator) gave a koto lecture and concert at the University of Kentucky on March 7. On September 23, she presented the paper “Music Curriculum Reforms in Japan: Traditional Music in the Schools and Society” at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. On October 27, at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas, Prescott will give a concert and lecture, “Koto Music of Japan: Traditional to Modern.”
EASC staff changes
The East Asian Studies Center has undergone a number of staffing changes in the past few months. We would like to thank those who served and moved on, and welcome those now working with us. Thanks go to Melissa Gross, Francis Tan, Jeremy Mixell, Susan Furukawa, Brian Flaherty, Ian Robertson, and W. Clarke Hudson for their great work here at the Center.
Our new staff includes Nancy Alexander who is our Database and Office Coordinator, replacing Melissa Gross. Alexander will begin a Masters in Library Science in the spring. Paul Amato has taken over for Brian Flaherty as Grants and Financial Assistant. Amato is finishing his Masters in early Chinese religion in EALC. Flaherty has left to study for a year at Tianjin University in China. Graham Bauerle replaces Stephan Kory as Subscriptions Manager for the Journal of Chinese Religions. Bauerle is working on his Masters in EALC. Nikhil Gupta is our new computer assistant, replacing Ian Robertson. Gupta is pursuing a Masters in Information Systems at the Kelley School of Business and will be graduating next year. Margaret Key is the Center's new Associate Director, having taken over for Jacques Fuqua who is now Director of International Engagement and Protocol at the University of Illinois. Key is finishing her Ph.D. in Japanese in EALC. Stephan Kory moves from Subscription Manager to Journal Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Chinese Religions. He is finishing his Ph.D. work on medieval Chinese religions and literature in EALC. Kory replaces Hudson who is a Visiting Lecturer for EALC and is completing his Religious Studies dissertation on inner alchemy this year. Patsy Rahn joins us as the Newsletter Editor, replacing Susan Furukawa. Rahn also acts as Colloquium Coordinator and Outreach Assistant. She is finishing her Masters in East Asian Studies in EALC. Akira Ulmer is helping with EASC outreach as part of the work-study program. He is completing a B.A. in Language and Culture in EALC. We also welcome two new Office Assistants through the work-study program: Zuri Phelps, who is working on a B.A. in the department of AMID, and Lena Stouppe, who is pursuing a B.A.in Journalism.
Michiko Suzuki received her Ph.D. in Japanese with a minor in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2002. She also holds a M. Phil. in English Renaissance Literature from Cambridge University and an M.A.in English Literature from the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on the intersection of literature and culture, particularly women's writing and popular literature. In her current book project, “Becoming Female in Modernity: Discourses of Love in Japanese Women's Writing: 1910 – 1940,” she examines pre-war novels by Japanese women writers. Through her cultural-studies approach to literature, she analyzes how such narratives engage the literary, socio-historical, and cultural discourses of the times on such issues as same-sex love, marital love, and maternal love.
Her next book project will focus on the pre-war genre of family romance in Japan. Such romances were serialized in magazines and newspapers and read by women for fun while also often containing moral messages.They tended to reflected social changes such as the changing nature of family politics. In this time of social transitioning, the figure of the stepmother played a prominent role. Suzuki would like to focus on the interesting and little-studied figure of the stepmother and the social phenomenon surrounding the changing family dynamics as reflected in the family romance genre.
This fall she is teaching a graduate seminar on modern Japanese literature from the 1890s to the 1940s. In the spring she will teach the second half of third-year Japanese as well as an undergraduate survey of Japanese literature in which she will focus on issues of modernity in Japanese literature.
Suzuki looks forward to being a part of the dynamic IU East Asianist community.