EASC Newsletter

EASC Reports

IU Ranks #7 in East Asian Languages and Cultures
The East Asian Languages and Cultures program at IU was recently ranked number seven nationwide according to the recently-released results of the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, a new scholarly index designed to be an onjective measure of academic productivity. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the index is “partly financed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook and produced by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company, [and it] rates faculty members’ scholarly output at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country. It examines the number of book and journal articles published by each program’s faculty, as well as journal citations, awards, honors, and grants received.”

New EASC Staff
The EASC is glad to welcome several new staff members:

Anna Christerson, office assistant
Anna is a freshman and is currently an exploratory student at IU. She was born and raised north of Chicago and hopes to pursue either teaching or dentistry.
Saba Kifle, outreach affice assistant
Saba is a sophomore pursuing a degree in philosophy and international studies. She is originally from Eritrea, a country in the northeastern region of Africa. She was born in Germany and raised in Arlington, VA. She is interested in studying abroad in either Cairo or Tokyo.

EASC also welcomes EALC’s new undergraduate advisor, Kim Hinton. Originally from Pennsylvania, Kim moved to Bloomington twelve years ago. She received an M.A. from IU in Russian literature and is currently working on a Ph.D. in theatre and drama. Prior to becoming an academic advisor, she worked for over four years in the Office of Student Financial Assistance. Kim’s studies have introduced her to many forms of East Asian theatre, and she would one day love to see live Noh and Kabuki performances.

Faculty Member to Present Art Exhibit
EASC faculty member Laurel Cornell (Sociology) will be presenting her multimedia art works in an exhibition called “The Landscape of Osaka: Maps, Graphs, Photographs, Drawings,” held February 1-28 in the Textillery Gallery at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. The opening reception will be February 2, 5-7 p.m.

East Asian Business and Culture Course and Study Tour
Spring 2007 is the fifth time that the East Asian Studies Center is offering its East Asian business and culture course and study tour, this time with a focus on South Korea. Previous years’ programs have focused on Japan (2003, 2004) and China (2005, 2006). As with the Japan and China programs, the Korea program is a three-credit course and study tour jointly offered by the Kelley School of Business and EALC and includes a ten-day study tour over Spring Break. The instructors of the course and leaders of the study tour are Michael Robinson (EALC professor of Korean history) and M.A. Venkataraman (chair of the Undergraduate Program at the Kelley School). Twenty students were selected for this semester’s program: eleven from the College of Arts and Sciences (including seven Liberal Arts and Management Program students) and nine from the Kelley School.

The class is project- and discussion-oriented. The first part of the semester provides students with basic background information on South Korea’s business environment, language, culture, and history. During Spring Break students will visit historical and cultural sites in southern South Korea as well as companies and important commercial areas. A Freeman Foundation grant will provide round-trip airfare for students and a small subsidy for hotel and in-country expenses.

“Monsters and the Monstrous” Workshop
A workshop called “Monsters and the Monstrous in Premodern Japanese History and Culture” will be held March 30-31 on the IU Bloomington campus. This workshop will be the first of two events—the second workshop, planned to be held next spring, will concentrate on the modern period. The goal of the workshops is to consider the cultural work that monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures do and to investigate the place of monsters and ideas about the monstrous in Japanese history and culture.

Participants in the March workshop will be Herman Ooms (UCLA), Susan Klein (UC-Irvine), Elizabeth Oyler (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Christine Marran (University of Minnesota), Thomas Keirstead (IU), Hank Glassman (Haverford College), Michael Dylan Foster (UC-Riverside), Sumie Jones (IU), and Jason Josephson (Princeton University).

IL/IN East Asian Education Network Dissertation Workshop
The IL/IN East Asian Education Network, established in 2005 as a collaborative initiative to support networking and exchange of research on East Asian education among faculty and graduate students at IU and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, will hold its fourth dissertation workshop on Saturday, April 21 at the IU School of Education. This workshop meeting follows up on a very lively workshop held in Illinois in October, which included doctoral students from seven universities in the Midwest region. Interested students and faculty should contact Professor Heidi Ross (haross@indiana.edu) for further information.

IL/IN East Asia Ethnography Dissertation Workshop
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and IU Title VI National Resource Center Consortium (IL/IN NRC Consortium) announces a summer dissertation workshop in the field of East Asian ethnography and invites applications from doctoral students in anthropology or other related disciplines who are writing ethnography-based dissertations.

This workshop is designed to enable students who are in the process of writing their dissertations to engage in intensive discussions with faculty and each other. Possibilities for creating continuing networks among interested students and faculty will also be explored. Each student will be given time to present a chapter from his/her work in progress, and faculty members will respond to the presentations.

The workshop will begin in the morning on Friday, May 4 and conclude at noon on Saturday, May 5. Eight students will be selected for participation, and they will be mentored at the workshop by three faculty from the consortium universities: Roger Janelli (Professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, IU), Sara Friedman (Assistant Professor, Anthropology, IU), and Karen Kelsky (Associate Professor, Anthropology and EALC, University of Illinois).

All application materials must be received by Friday, March 2. The application consists of two items: 1) a current CV, and 2) an 8-10 page double-spaced dissertation proposal or an 8-10 page excerpt from the dissertation in progress. Participants will be selected on the basis of their submitted materials and the potential for useful exchanges among them. Selected participants will submit the chapter or other excerpt to be examined at the workshop no later than April 15. The consortium will cover transportation costs (maximum $500) to Champaign, IL as well as housing for two nights and meals.

Submit application materials to:
IL/IN Consortium 2007 Summer Dissertation Workshop
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
230 International Studies Building
910 S. Fifth St.
Champaign, IL 61820

Questions may be directed to Anne Prescott, Associate Director, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (EAPS), (217)244-4601; aprescot@uiuc.edu.

IL/IN East Asian Transnational Film Seminar
An IL/IN NRC Consortium summer seminar on transnational film, titled “East Asian Cinema in Transnational Contexts,” will be held May 21-22 on the IU Bloomington campus. It will be open to twenty graduate students and advanced undergrads from IU, the University of Illinois, and other colleges and universities in the Midwest and will be led by Gary Xu (Associate Professor of EALC and Comparative Literature, University of Illinois), Frances Gateward (Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and African American Studies & Research, University of Illinois), David Desser (Professor and Director of the Unit for Cinema Studies, University of Illinois), and Greg Waller (Professor of Communication and Culture and Department Chair, IU).

Seminar Description:
East Asian cinema, especially the major cinemas of Japan, China (Hong Kong, P.R.C., Taiwan), and South Korea, have long engaged in intra-regional and transnational exchanges—of personnel, of capital, of influence. Shared cultural values, increasingly intertwined histories, and new communication technologies have led to what seems to be a kind of trans-East Asian cinema. Yet “East Asian” cinema has extended its reach: to South Asia and Southeast Asia since the 1970s and to an increasingly global presence since the late 1980s. This seminar will examine, through case studies of individual films and filmmakers and theoretical perspectives of globalization and new media, the ways in which East Asian cinema has historically engaged in transnational exchanges and a globalizing film culture.

Information on registering for this seminar will be available in February.