Faculty News

In 2005, Christopher I. Beckwith (CEUS) completed his Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship (Tokyo, Japan, 2004-2005) and began tenure of his Guggenheim Fellowship (awarded 2004, deferred to this year, 2005-2006).

He edited and contributed to Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II published by Brill (2005). Among the parts authored by him are: “Introduction: Toward a Tibeto-Burman Theory”; “The Sonority Sequencing Principle and Old Tibetan Syllable Margins”; and “Old Tibetan and the Dialects and Periodization of Old Chinese.”

Beckwith also published “The Chinese Names of Tibet, Tabghatch, and the Turks” in Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 14 (2005).

He was invited to give a lecture, “Noun Classification, Social Classification and Biology: Toward a Theory of Sublinguistic Categorization,” at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo, in January 2005.

Beckwith also presented the paper “The Location and Linguistic Identification of the Koguryo Language” at the Conference on the Language(s) of Koguryo and the Reconstruction of Old Korean and Neighboring Languages, held in Germany at Universitat Hamburg in September.

Gardner Bovingdon (CEUS) attended the conference A Forum on Non-traditional Security in Central and Western Asia held in Urumci (Wulumuqi), Xinjiang in October. He presented the paper “Thinking Non-traditionally about Security in Central Asia ” (“Dui Zhongya fei chuantong anquan wenti de sisuo”). Conference participants included several dozen scholars from China, as well as scholars from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

Robert F. Campany (REL/EALC) was invited to talk at the conference New Perspectives on Daoist Religion: A Symposium in Celebration of The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, held in October at the University of Chicago. He presented the paper “Adepts and Their Communities (pre-350 C.E.).”

Also by invitation, he presented the paper “Adepts and Their Communities” at the Early Medieval China workshop held in December at Columbia University.

Campany received the 2005 Trustees Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence, Department of Religious Studies.

He also coordinated the process by which faculty in the Department of Religious Studies crafted a new doctoral program in Chinese religions. A description of the program is available on the Department of Religious Studies website.

Having previously served two terms in the 1990s, Campany was elected in 2005 to serve another term on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions.

Anne Prescott (EASC) served as panel chair and presented at the Asia in the Curriculum Symposium for the panel “Students Bringing Asian Studies into the Community: Undergraduate Service Learning Project.”

In October, she presented five koto concerts in Arkansas at Lyon College and at Arkansas State University-Newport.

In February she will participate in the lecture portion of a narrated concert titled A Century of New Music for Koto and Shakuhachi. It will take place at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. It is part of a year-long observance of the centennial of Charles Lang Freer's 1906 endowment and gift to the Smithsonian of his Asian collection, which forms the basis of the permanent collection today.

Heidi Ross (EDUC/EALC) participated in an international child and development forum in Beijing, co-sponsored by the Soong Ching Ling Foundation and UNICEF in October 2005.

Ross; three Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (ELPS) doctoral students, Jingjing Lou, Olga Rybakova, and Phoebe Wakhungu; and University of Michigan Higher Education doctoral student Lijing Yang completed a major review of literacy in China for UNESCO's 2005 Global Monitoring Report, titled Where and Who are the World's Illiterates: China.

Aaron Stalnaker (REL/EALC) presented the paper “Confucian Democracy and the Virtue of Deference” at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York in December.

He also published the following articles:

“Focus Introduction: Anthropos and Ethics: Categories of Inquiry and Procedures of Comparison” (co-authored with Mark Berkson, Thomas Lewis, and Jon Schofer). Journal of Religious Ethics 33.2 (Summer 2005).

“Comparative Religious Ethics and the Problem of ‘Human Nature.'” Journal of Religious Ethics 33.2 (Summer 2005).

“Xunzi,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion, 2 nd ed. (Macmillan, 2005).

Lynn Struve (HIST & EALC), edited Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition: East Asia from Ming to Qing (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005).

Last summer Struve gave presentations in Taiwan, Singapore, and Beijing. In Taiwan, she spoke on “Dreams, Memory, and Consciousness in Late Ming” at the Academia Sinica and on “Trauma, Memory, and History” at National Central University.

In Singapore, she presented the paper “Dream-Memory and Intellectual Malaise at the End of the Ming: The Case of Huang Chunyao” at a conference on Evolving Cultural Memory in Late Imperial China and Southeast Asia.

In Beijing, for the History Department of Beijing Normal University, she delivered the papers “Time of History, Time in History” and “Memory, Time, Psychology and Huang Chunyao's Jiashen riji.”

Last fall at a memorial conference at Princeton University for the late sinologist Frederick W. Mote, she participated in a panel on “Books in History, History in Books” and discussed certain vagaries in Republican-period publications of texts from the Ming-Qing transition.

These presentations reflect her ongoing research in personal accounts from the Ming-Qing transition of the middle seventeenth century, particularly diaries and memoirs that extensively record the subjects' dreams.

Michiko Suzuki (EALC) presented the paper “The Production of Intratextual Meaning: Hisao Juran's Kyarako san ” at the annual meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies at Darmouth College in October.

In November, she delivered the paper “Female Same-Sex Love in Prewar Japan: Yoshiya Nobuko and Sexology Discourse” as part of the Comparative Queer Workshop sponsored by University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC) has been investigating rhyming patterns in Japanese hip-hop music, and in October she presented with Kyoko Okamura (Linguistics) and Stuart Davis (Linguistics) the paper “Rock Rhymes in Japanese Hip-Hop Rhymes” at the 15^th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference at the University of Wisconsin.

Her article “Giongo, gitaigo no gengogakuteki zyuuyoosei to nihongokyooiku” [The linguistic relevance of mimetics and its pedagogical implication] was published in M. Minami (ed.) Linguistics and Japanese Language Education IV, Kurosio (2005).

Jeff Wasserstrom recently reviewed Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story for the Chicago Tribune. He also reviewed a new Chinese language survey of modern East Asian history forthcoming in the January-February 2006 issue of Foreign Policy.

His book China's Brave New World -- And Other Tales for Global Times, a collection of short essays on China, travel, and globalization, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

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