EASC Newsletter

Student News

New Phi Beta Kappa Elections
Congratulations to the following students from the EALC department who have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa this semester.

Fiona Henry (Political Science/EALC)

Stephanie Louraine (Linguistics/EALC)

Brett Norris (EALC/International Studies/Anthropology)

Undergraduate Award Winners
The following undergraduate students have been awarded EALC scholarships:

Riva Jewell-Vitale has been awarded the Yasuda Scholarship, which was created in honor of Professor Emeritus Kenneth Yasuda for undergraduates demonstrating excellence in Japanese studies.

Rebecca Gabriel , Erin Griffin, and Jocelyn Miller have been awarded the Uehara Scholarship. This scholarship was created in honor of the late professor Toyoaki Uehara for undergraduates showing excellence in East Asian studies.

Tyler Fry has been awarded the Gines Scholarship given by EALC alumnus James Gines and his wife Noriko for undergraduates combining excellence in an East Asian language with excellence in professional school studies.

Mike Graff has been awarded the Paul Nutter Memorial Scholarship. This scholarship was created in memory and honor of Paul Nutter, an EALC undergraduate Japanese major, for students in any East Asian language demonstrating the same heart and commitment to learning that Paul expressed.

Brett Hunsaker is the first recipient of the Korean Visiting Scholars’ Award. (See article above for further details regarding the award.)

The following undergraduates have been awarded EASC prizes for excellence in Asian studies: Amanda Hilliard—the SOFOKS Award for Korean Studies; Dawn Barber—the Alpine Prize for Japanese Studies; and Drew Machowicz—the Undergraduate Award for Chinese Studies. Congratulations to all for their hard work!

Other Student News
Susan Furukawa (Ph.D. in EALC) has been awarded two dissertation research fellowships for next year—a 2007-08 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant and a Japan Foundation fellowship.

Erik J. Hammerström (Ph.D. in Religious Studies) has won a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant to spend next year in Taiwan doing research for his dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Buddhists Talk Science in Modern China (1919-1949).” This spring he taught his first class, REL 202, Modern East Asian Buddhism. He also delivered two papers this school year. The first was at a roundtable discussion he led at the IBC Buddhist Studies Conference, which took place at the University of the West in L.A. in October, where he presented the paper “Buddhism in Republican China: Superstition, Religion, or Science?” The second paper was part of a panel he organized called “Science and Chinese Traditions” for the annual meeting of the Midwest Region of the American Academy of Religion. The title of that paper was “Chinese Buddhist and American Christian Critiques of Science: 1920-1940.” This year Hammerström also helped organize the 2007 IU Religious Studies Graduate Student Symposium and began a listserv for scholars studying modern and early modern Chinese Buddhism at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/contemp_chinese_budd/.

Ju Young Jin (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature) has been awarded the 2007-08 Society of Friends of Korean Studies (SOFOKS) Fellowship, an annual fellowship that supports graduate training in Korean studies at IU. She will spend her fellowship year continuing her doctoral studies, focusing on the study of nihilism in modernist and postmodernist literature.

Stephan Kory (Ph.D. in EALC) was recently awarded a Fulbright fellowship and will be working in Beijing from October 2007 to July 2008. Kory also presented the paper “Invisibility and Prognosticative Power: A Chinese Mantic Technique known as Dunjia” at the 2007 Midwest American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in March.

Jingjing Lou (Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies) has just been awarded a 2007 Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for research related to education. Her dissertation project is titled “Identity and Schooling in Midwest China: An Ethnographic Study of Rural Chinese Middle School Students.” She is currently in a rural middle school in Shaanxi Province, China conducting dissertation fieldwork.

David Nelson (Ph.D. in History) recently accepted a tenure-track position to teach Asian history at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN.

Jonathan Pettit (Ph.D. in EALC and religious studies) received the Louise Wallace Hackney Fellowship for the Study of Chinese Art for the 2007-08 academic year. He will be using the fellowship to study ancient temple murals in Luoyang and Dunhuang, China, as well as contemporary Taiwanese temple paintings. This summer he will be teaching R153, Religions of the East, for the Department of Religious Studies in the first summer session.

Brian Ruh (Ph.D. in Communication and Culture) presented the paper “America’s Anime, Japan’s Anime: Identifying Japanese Animation in Global Circulation” at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago. He received an EASC travel grant to help defray the costs of attending the conference.

Jeeyoung Shin (Ph.D. in Communication and Culture) presented the paper “More than Meets the Eye: The King and the Clown and the Representation of Homosexuality in Contemporary South Korean Cinema” at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference. She also chaired and organized the panel “Images of North Korea in Contemporary South Korean Media and Literature” at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in March. For the same panel, she also presented the paper “A Bittersweet Love Story?: Politics of the New Intimacy toward North Korea(ns) in Contemporary South Korean Cinema.” Her trip to AAS was funded by travel grants from the association's Northeast Asia Council and the EASC.

Michael Stanley-Baker (Ph.D. in EALC and Religious Studies) recently gave papers at three conferences. The first was at the “Inventing Traditions: A Symposium in Anthropological Research” conference sponsored by the IU Anthropology Graduate Student Association in February where he gave a paper titled “De-Colonizing Hobsbawm: Suggestions for Post-Constructivist Scholarship.” The second was a paper titled “Cultural Fractals: Immeasurable Boundaries of Chinese Medicine and Religion” at the Mid-Atlantic Regional American Academy of Religion’s “Science and Religion” conference in March in Chicago. The following week he gave a paper at an interdisciplinary graduate student conference at Harvard, titled “Bodily Proof,” funded by a travel grant from EASC. Additionally, last summer Stanley-Baker won a Taiwan Ministry of Education language grant, which he will use this summer in Taipei to study Taiwanese and advanced Mandarin at the Mandarin Training Centre. During this time he will also be meeting Daoist studies and Chinese medicine scholars at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and doing a trial videography of a Pudu, or Universal Salvation, rite. This semester he also won a three-year funded studentship at the Department of History of Medicine at University College London and will be moving there in the Fall to write his dissertation. Stanley-Baker notes, “I am very grateful to EALC for the support, training and friendship that have been so generously offered by everyone I've worked with in the department. I've been very touched by everyone's kindness.” Finally, he adds that he will be married to Dr. Jennifer Cash, currently of the University of Pittsburgh, at Trinity Church on Kirkwood on May 12 th at 3:30 p.m. and warmly welcomes anyone who wishes to come to the ceremony.

Nicole Willock (Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies) presented a paper on the panel “Authority Structures in Amdo/Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan: Conflict and Compromise” at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March. Her paper was titled “A Mellifluous Voice: The Life Work of Alak Tshetan Zhabdrung Jigme Rigpe Lodro.” She also received an EASC travel grant that helped defray her travel costs.

Kyoim Yun (Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology) recently accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas. She will be teaching one Korean language course and one Korean/East Asian culture/folklore/literature course. Additionally, with financial support from an EASC travel grant, she delivered a paper titled “Magic and Commerce: The Multiple Voices of Modernity in Cheju Shamanic Practice” at the Spring 2007 Society for the Anthropology of Religion meeting held in Phoenix in April.

Ran Zhang (Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Educational Psychology) won a 2006 Chinese Overseas Ph.D. Students Scholarship. The scholarship was established in 2002 by the China Scholarship Council, an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. This scholarship of $5,000 provides general support to outstanding Chinese Ph.D. students worldwide, and Zhang is the first IU student to have won the award. This summer she will start data collection for her dissertation on students’ consciousness of their legal rights to due process in Chinese universities.