EASC Newsletter

Faculty News

Gardner Bovingdon (Central Eurasian Studies) presented the paper "China's Northwest as Part of Central Asia" at the public forum "Confronting the New Eurasia II: Multiregional Perspectives" in March at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The forum was sponsored by the University of Illinois’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, in conjunction with the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Charles Greer (Geography) retired in December after nearly thirty years at IU. He continues to write, do research, and advise students and has just edited, with Jenny Kander, a collection of poems titled Say This of Horses: A Selection of Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2007).

Ho-fung Hung (Sociology) gave a lecture titled "The Rise of China and the Global Overaccumulation Crisis" at the Mellon Colloquium on Global Networks at the University of California, Riverside in March. The talk was based on an article forthcoming in the journal Review of International Political Economy. Different versions of the article have been published as "The Rise of China: Harbinger of a New Global Order, or in the Footsteps of Pre-crisis Japan and Asian Tigers?" in Japan Focus in February and presented as "Can China Survive Success? The Limits of China’s Spatial and Socio-political Restructurings" at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago in April.

Roger Janelli (Folklore and Ethnomusicology) will retire in May, after thirty-two years of distinguished service as a scholar and teacher at IU. Upon retirement, in addition to continuing his research, teaching, and service, he is looking forward to spending more time with his wife, a professor of anthropology at Dongguk University in Seoul.

Sumie Jones (Professor Emerita, EALC and Comparative Literature) recently worked as editorial consultant for McMillan's Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. She also contributed the entry "Erotic Literature—Japan." Jones retired in December, after thirty years as an IU scholar and teacher and a leader in the EASC community. She continues her work on her NEH-funded three-volume anthology of early modern Japanese literature.

Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Linguistics) received a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences for a traditional Japanese music workshop to be held in Bloomington in October 2007. An article Kitagawa wrote with Janet Dean Fodor (Professor of Linguistics, City University of New York), "Prosodic Influences on Syntactic Judgments," appeared in a volume titled Gradience in Grammar: Generative Perspectives (Oxford University Press).

Jean Robinson (Political Science and EALC) was awarded the Dean of Faculties Distinguished Service Award for her outstanding service to IU and the community.

Michael Robinson ’s (EALC) newest book, Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History (University of Hawaii Press, 2007), will be coming out in May. According to the press, "Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910."

Elliot Sperling (Central Eurasian Studies) chaired the panel "Authority Structures in Amdo/Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan: Conflict and Compromise" at the national meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Boston in March.

Michiko Suzuki (EALC) presented a paper titled "Questioning Chastity in Taishō Popular Fiction: Kikuchi Kan's Shinju fujin" in March at UC Berkeley for "Voice in Japanese Literature: Symposium in Honor of Susan Matisoff." She has also received an Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council Japan studies grant for domestic travel to conduct research at Stanford University this summer.

Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC) presented a paper titled "Language Change in Progress: Evidence from Computer-Mediated Communication" at the 33 rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society held at University of California, Berkeley in February. In March she presented with Andrea Tews (M.A. in EALC) the joint paper "Hip Hop Rhyming and the Notion of Mora" at the annual seminar of the Association of Teachers of Japanese in Boston. She has also been awarded a Short-Term Research Fellowship by the Japan Foundation for her new research project on language change in Japanese.

Yasuko Ito Watt (EALC) was invited to give a talk on using manga and anime in Japanese classes at a Japanese language workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in February. She was also invited to speak on classical Japanese elements in modern Japanese writings at the meeting of the Classical Japanese Special Interest Group of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, which was held at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in March. She also served as the head judge at the 21 st Annual Japanese Language Speech Contest at the Japanese Consulate in Chicago in March.

George Wilson (Professor Emeritus, EALC and History) gave a talk in March at the University of Michigan for the Center for Japanese Studies Noon Lecture Series. His topic was "Incidents of Change in Japan from Perry to the Meiji Restoration." It is part of Wilson’s larger project to promote the "history of incidents" as a basis for reviving historical narrative.