EASC Newsletter

Faculty News

Poynter Center Fellows
In August the director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions announced the names of the six 2006-07 Poynter Center Fellows, two of whom are EASC faculty members. Joseph Hoffmann (Law) and Lynn Struve (History and EALC) will be participating in the yearlong seminar on “Memory: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics,” which will focus on the moral dimensions, political implications, and cultural expressions of memory. The Poynter Center Faculty Fellowship and Seminar promote interdisciplinary inquiry by bringing together at least five fellows each year for ten seminar meetings on a focal theme with theoretical and practical dimensions. The four other seminar participants this year are Purnima Bose (English and Cultural Studies), Maria Bucur (History), Patrick Dove (Spanish and Portuguese), and John L. Lucaites (Communication and Culture). Read more at: http://poynter.indiana.edu/fellows.shtml.

Additional Faculty News

Christopher P. Atwood (Central Eurasian Studies) visited China, Mongolia, and the Buriat regions of Siberia this summer. While there he gave the following papers: “Chengjisi Han he Wokuotai Han: Hubilie Han de jianjie [Chinggis Khan and Ögedei Khan: The View from Qubilai Khan]” at Beijing’s Central Nationalities University in June, “How the Mongols Rejected the Secret History” at Buriat State University in Ulaan-Üde in July, and a Mongolian version of the same paper (“Mongolchuud kherkhen ‘Nuuts Towchoog’ khüleej awakhgüi baisan tukhai”) at the Ninth International Congress of Mongolists in Ulaanbaatar in August. All of these papers relate to his book in preparation, an introduction to and translation of the Veritable Records of Chinggis [i.e. Genghis] and Ögedei khans, an important and under-studied medieval source on the thirteenth-century Mongolian empire. He also was invited to Peking University’s Mongolian Studies Center and to the Institute of Mongolian, Buddhist, and Tibetan Studies in Ulaan-Üde to discuss his own work and Mongolian studies at IU. This year (2006-07) he is at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, beginning a new project in social history that questions the concept of “tribalism” or kin-based society among the Mongolian and Inner Asian nomads.

Christopher I. Beckwith (Central Eurasian Studies) completed tenure of his Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006) at the beginning of the summer. He also published four articles in the spring and summer: “Methodological Observations on Some Recent Studies of the Early Ethnolinguistic History of Korea and Vicinity,” Altai Hakpo 16 (2006): 199-234; “The Ethnolinguistic History of the Early Korean Peninsula Region: Japanese-Koguryoic and Other Languages in the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla Kingdoms,” Journal of Inner and East Asian Studies 2, no. 2 (2006): 34-64; “Comparative Morphology and Japanese-Koguryoic History: Toward an Ethnolinguistic Solution of the Altaic Problem” and “The Silla Word for ‘walled city’ and the Ancestor of Modern Korean” (co-authored with Gisaburo N. KIYOSE) in Motoki NAKAJIMA, ed., Arutaigo kenkyū – Altaistic Studies (Tokyo: Daito Bunka University, 2006). He presented the paper “A Reexamination of the Pai-lang Songs” at the Third Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages Symposium, which he organized and mostly chaired. It was held in conjunction with the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Königswinter in August. Additionally, Professor JEONG Gwang (of Seoul National University) has just published a Korean translation of Professor Beckwith’s book 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).

Sara Friedman (Anthropology/Gender Studies) is the author of the book, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China, published in June 2006 by the Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press. She also received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation to conduct research in Taiwan and China in 2007-08 for her project “Citizenship as Official and Everyday Practice: Chinese Marital Immigrants in Taiwan.”

Ho-fung HUNG (Sociology) presented the paper “A Rocky Road from Empire to Nation: The Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan Questions in China’s Modernity” in the panel “Nations and Nationalism” of the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montreal in August. At the same meeting, he organized and presided on a panel on “China and Global Capitalism,” which addressed the impact of the rise of China on the global capitalist system from the perspectives of world income distribution, natural resources, global production networks, and the international labor movement. Also in August, he presented a paper, “Rise of China and the Global Overaccumulation Crisis,” on the panel “Globalization: Walmartization of the World?” at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Studies of Social Problems in Montreal. In September he visited the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and gave a talk on “Chinese Nationalism and Its Discontents: 1950s Tibet and 1980s Hong Kong in Comparative Perspective.”

Yoshihisa KITAGAWA (Linguistics) presented a keynote presentation, “Anatomy of Acceptability Judgments,” at the Fifth International Workshop on Evolutionary Cognitive Sciences—Human Sentence Processing and Production held at the University of Tokyo. The following three research papers have been or will be published in 2006: “Prosodic Influence on Syntactic Judgments” (co-authored with Janet Dean Fodor) in Gisbert Fanselow, et al., eds., Gradience in Grammar: Generative Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); “Wh-scope Puzzles,” Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society; and “Naze,” in Festschrift for Heizo Nakajima (Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobō), 101-120. Indiana University Working Papers in Linguistics: Syntax and Beyond, vol. 5, which he edited with Department of Linguistics graduate students Dorian Roehrs and Ock-Hwan KIM, has also been published. Additionally, Kitagawa and Ayumi UEYAMA’s book Seisei bunpō no kangae-kata (Ways of Thinking in Generative Grammar), published in 2004 by Kenkyusha, is now in its second printing.

Masato OGAWA (Education, Kokomo) published the article “Causation, Controversy, and Contrition: Recent Developments in the Japanese History Textbook Content and Selection Process” in Oxford Studies in Comparative Education with Sherry L. Field ( University of Texas at Austin). Ogawa will present a session titled “A War of Words: Textbooks, History, and Politics Today” with social studies educators from the United States, China, and South Korea at the National Social Studies Supervisors Association Annual Conference in Washington, DC in December. The session will address why a current Japanese history textbook provoked protests in Asian countries, how history textbooks help to shape people’s thinking, and how they can impact international relations.

David Quinter (Religious Studies) is a visiting faculty member specializing in Japanese Buddhism. He is currently working on two major projects. The first is a book-in-progress, provisionally titled From Charity to War: The Shingon Ritsu School and the Mañjuśrī Cult in the Kamakura Period, which focuses on the thought and practices of Eison (1201-90) and his disciples in connection with the cult of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. This is an adaptation of Quinter’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Shingon Ritsu School and the Mañjuśrī Cult in the Kamakura Period: From Eison to Monkan.” His second major project is a study of the influential monk Ninshō (1217-1303) and Kamakura-period Buddhism in Kamakura. While “Kamakura Buddhism” has received wide attention in scholarship on Japanese Buddhism, little Western-language research has taken a regional approach centering on Buddhism in the Kamakura area itself, the seat of warrior rule in the medieval period.

Richard Rubinger (EALC) gave a talk at Princeton University on October 11 titled “Signs, Ciphers, and Seals: Searching for Literacy in Early Modern Japan.” He also had two articles published in French through the University of Paris taken from chapters of his forthcoming monograph on premodern literacy in Japan.

Aaron Stalnaker’s (Religious Studies/EALC) Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine was published in July by Georgetown University Press. The book examines and compares the thought and practice of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo and the early Confucian Xunzi in order to more clearly expose the intellectual and political issues involved in the retrieval of “classic” ethical sources in diverse contemporary societies, illuminating a path toward a contemporary understanding of difference.

Lynn Struve (History/EALC) presented a paper on “Dream Records and the Cultural Memory of the Ming-Qing Transition in Seventeenth-Century China” in May at a conference on “Cultural Memory and Cultures in Transition” at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

Michiko SUZUKI (EALC) published the article “Writing Same-Sex Love: Sexology and Literary Representation in Yoshiya Nobuko’s Early Fiction” in Journal of Asian Studies v. 65, no. 3 (August 2006). She was also a commentator on graduate student papers at the IU Graduate Student Symposium “Genji Goes Pop: Japanese Classics and Modern Media” in April.

Natsuko TSUJIMURA (EALC) published the chapter “Why Not All Verbs Are Learned Equally: The Intransitive Verb Bias in Japanese” in N. Gagarina and I. Guelzow, eds., Acquisition of Verb Grammar and Verb Arguments (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 105-122. She recently presented the paper “A Construction-Based Approach to Phrasal Postpositions in Japanese” at the Fourth International Conference on Construction Grammar held in September at the University of Tokyo, her attendance at which was made possible through the Overseas Conference Fund. Also, she has been appointed to serve on the Special Overseas Editorial Board for the journal Gengo Kenkyu (Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan), and advance copies of the second edition of her book An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2007) have been printed and are available.

Margaret Mian YAN (EALC) recently published the book Introduction to Chinese Dialectology (LINCOM GmbH, 2006). According to its description, the book “intends to give a comprehensive account of the studies on Chinese dialects tracing from the first Chinese dialect study of Yang Xiong’s Fangyan ‘Dialect’ to present works, covering mainly phonological and lexical features.”