EASC Newsletter: January 2006

A Letter from the Associate Director

Margaret Key

It was a busy fall at EASC, with many activities completed and a number still underway, some of which you will read about in this newsletter. The biggest news is that the EASC is one of three Indiana University winners of the prestigious 2005 Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education, in the Higher Education category. We can be proud of this recognition of the impact our K-12 outreach programs have had on the quality of international education in the United States.

Another important piece of news is that in November the EASC and the University of Illinois's Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies submitted a Title VI proposal that seeks to establish the two centers as consortial partners in a Comprehensive National Resource Center (NRC) for the grant term 2006-2010. Thanks in large part to faculty and departmental staff, who responded quickly and amply to our requests for data and proposals, we believe we put together a very competitive proposal to the U.S. Department of Education, but we will have to wait until spring to hear the results. This grant would enable us to undertake many new initiatives in teaching and outreach.

Along with the NRC grant, we have also applied for FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowships. Support for our many excellent graduate students is an ongoing issue, and FLAS awards would be a big help.

We look forward to an equally busy spring semester as we prepare to host a major international conference in May, “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.” We will also be gearing up for the start of a new five-year program that begins this fall, the POSCO TJ Park Foundation NGO Fellowship Program, which will bring two Korean NGO leaders to IU each year for year-long sabbaticals.

This spring we also continue to strengthen our ties with East Asianists at the University of Illinois, our partner in the IL/IN East Asia Initiative. Six of our faculty will be participating in the East Asian Graduate Seminar at Illinois this semester, leading sessions on Japanese colonialism (Michael Robinson), comparative welfare systems (Greg Kasza), “development” as a historical construct (Scott O'Bryan), global cities (Jeff Wasserstrom), and ethnic politics (Gardner Bovingdon and Sara Friedman).

Finally, let me remind you to check out the on-line catalog of our video lending library on our home page. We have more than 1,000 feature films, documentaries, and television dramas in our collection and have recently added some 400 new Japanese videos.

With wishes for a peaceful and happy 2006,

Margaret Key
Associate Director
East Asian Studies Center

Reports

Goldman Sachs Award

Three international programs at Indiana University collectively won the 2005 Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education. Winning in the Higher Education category and chosen from among five hundred applications, the East Asian Studies Center, the Center for the Study of Global Change, and the School of Education’s Cultural Immersion Project, an overseas student teaching program, share the prestigious award and were honored at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. in December.

The East Asian Studies Center places great emphasis on its teacher outreach through two flagship programs: the Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School workshop for high school English teachers and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) seminars for middle and high school teachers. These programs have enriched the knowledge of East Asia for nearly one thousand educators through extensive seminars led by scholars in the field. The East Asian Literature workshop is held for one week at Indiana University. The NCTA seminars consist of thirty hours of training over a ten-week period and are held in different locations throughout the Midwest and South so as to provide opportunities for the greatest number over a broad geographical area.

The Center for the Study of Global Change connects the university’s extensive international resources, scholars, and students directly to Indiana’s K-12 classrooms through live interactive video technology. The Center also offers summer institutes for teachers on international topics ranging from trade and global climate change, to populations at risk and conflict resolution.

The School of Education offers a Cultural Immersion Project option in which pre-service teachers spend part of their student-teaching assignment in schools abroad. Partnerships with schools and education officials now exist in thirteen countries, including China, India, and Russia.

Upcoming international conference at Indiana University

On May 19th and 20th, the East Asian Studies Center will host a major international conference, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. This conference will examine China's political economy in comparative and theoretical perspective, bringing together thirty leading specialists. The keynote speaker will be UC-San Diego professor Stephan Haggard, one of the world's foremost scholars in political economy.

Scholars often portray China as being either a state with a plan-to-market transition economy, a developmental state, or a crony capitalist state. The Chinese government describes China as practicing “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Yet there is little substantive research placing China in comparative perspective to validate any of these claims. The conference's goal is to fill this gap. Papers will address a wide variety of issues, including: competing explanations for China's reform trajectory, the changing role of the Chinese state, corruption, foreign trade policy, strategies for technological innovation, protest, business lobbying, media reform, and chances for democratization.

The conference will be held at the Kelley School of Business. There is limited seating available for observers. For more information, visit the conference webpage (available beginning in February 2006), or contact organizer Scott Kennedy at kennedys@indiana.edu.

POSCO TJ Park Foundation NGO Fellowship Program to Begin September 2006

Mike Robinson (EALC) and the EASC have been invited to participate in a new five-year fellowship program for Korean non-governmental organization (NGO) members. Led by Stanford University's Korean Studies Program and generously funded by the POSCO TJ Park Foundation, this fellowship program has been established to provide key personnel of Korean NGOs the opportunity to spend time at leading North American universities gaining knowledge and experience that will further the development of NGOs in Korea.

The program will be supported by a consortium comprising Stanford University, Indiana University, Columbia University, George Washington University, and the University of British Columbia. Each university will host two fellows each year for five years starting September 2006.

Directed by Mike Robinson with administrative support provided by EASC, this program will be a major boost to Korean studies at IU. It will strengthen links to the professional schools, such as the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the School of Law, and greatly expand opportunities for faculty and students across a range of disciplines.  

Fieldwork

Heidi Ross (EDUC/EALC) traveled to China in October to conduct fieldwork in Shaanxi Province with Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (ELPS) doctoral student Lei Wang. Ross and Wang were pre-testing a survey to be distributed next summer to one thousand eighth-grade girls participating in a “spring bud” educational access and attainment project in the cities of Ankang and Shangluo, Shaanxi.

Ross and Wang also collaborated with two Dan Feng County middle school teachers, Na Li and Xiaoli Mei, who are interviewing their students through a “photovoice” methodology designed to elicit from students views on life at home, in school, and in society. Photovoice is a participatory research method aimed at building dialogue among culturally diverse groups and examining individuals’ perceptions of social reality through the use of photographic images. Twenty-six students in China and at Batchelor Middle School in Bloomington were given disposable cameras to frame, record, and evaluate their experiences in three areas: home, school, and society. Then, in an open-ended interview session, students discussed why they took their pictures and exchanged their photographs and evaluations.

The two middle school teachers, Na Li and Xiaoli Mei, will be in Bloomington from January 26 through February 5. They will be working with several graduate students in the School of Education and a middle school teacher at Batchelor Middle School. The project is being funded through a Pathways to Peace Grant that provides social studies teachers and students with cross-cultural learning opportunities. Anyone interested in meeting Li or Mei can contact them through Heidi Ross.

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.”

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:

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 15th 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.