EASC Newsletter: November 2007

A Letter from the Director

Heidi Ross

Writing this introduction sometimes feels like compiling one of those chatty holiday missives in which we share the year’s highlights with family and friends. Some achievements really are worth celebrating. Superlatives have their rightful place. Yet, not every EASC event, any more than every family vacation, can be a stand-out. It’s the balance of our accomplishments that add up to a satisfying, stimulating year.

With no year-end exaggeration, three events of 2007 will shape EASC priorities into the future. I’m afraid we can’t take credit for the first two: IUB’s North Central Association re-accreditation, and the inauguration of Michael McRobbie as IU’s 18th president on 18 October 2007 (East Asian numerologists take note). IUB’s accreditation report focuses particularly on the challenges the university will face in sustaining and strengthening “a cosmopolitan campus in a changing world.” The report identifies East Asia as a priority geographic region for enhanced teaching, learning, and research opportunities. In his inaugural address, President McRobbie likewise emphasized the critical importance to IU of knowledge about and engagement with East Asia, and his first trip abroad as president will be to China.

Institutional recognition of the importance of East Asia to IU’s educational enterprise has provided an energized context for our most important undertaking this year, the first external review of EASC since 1993. Preparation for the review began over a year ago with discussions among the EASC executive committee and other faculty members about our mission, successes, challenges, and short, medium, and long term goals. A survey developed in the spring of 2007 was distributed to solicit opinions about how well EASC served faculty needs. Based on our collective reflections, I drafted a director’s report summarizing EASC’s development, goals, programs, and resources, and a list of recommendations and suggestions to guide the review process. Finally, from November 6-9, EASC students, staff, faculty, administrators, and colleagues representing the diversity of international studies at IU met with an exceptionally well-qualified external review team, including Stan Rosen, Professor of Political Science and director of the East Asian Studies Center at USC; Barbara Brooks, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies and director or the Japan Initiative at City College of New York; and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Associate Professor and chair of East Asian Languages and Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The review team has broadly considered what campus resources and support have been and will be crucial to our vital missions of linking academic resources with K-12, business and professional communities, and of creating opportunities for faculty and students from diverse disciplines to come together for innovative scholarship and learning. They have helped us evaluate, among many other questions, whether our current mix of research and outreach programs and accompanying EASC staff effort are appropriate and serving all of our constituencies and our overall mission well. We anticipate receiving their report on these and other issues within the next several weeks. I look forward to sharing the report, and its implications for EASC priorities and programs, with you in the near future.

Until then, enjoy this newsletter, good luck with the last few weeks of the semester—and Happy Holidays!

EASC Reports

New Staff at EASC
Outreach assistant Ross Israel, an M.A. student in the Department of Linguistics, works on the NCTA Teaching about Asia seminars. He is a recent graduate of West Virginia University and has studied both Japanese and Mandarin.

After program assistant Alicia Fehring graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2006, she spent eight months teaching English in a Chinese university near Shanghai. She is in her first year as an M.A. student in EALC with a focus on contemporary China.

EASC’s grants assistant Brian Flaherty is currently finishing an M.A. project in early Chinese studies for EALC. He is also the lead instructor in Elementary Chinese 1 and 2.

Qiong Jiang is EASC’s outreach coordinator for the NCTA Teaching about Asia seminars and study tour. She earned her M.A. in Mass Communication at the University of Oregon, specializing in international communication.  During her graduate studies, Qiong acted as a media specialist for the Oregon Chinese K-16 Flagship Program. She has over five years of experience working as a journalist in China where she produced radio programs that focused on cultural exchange.

Christina Ondrik, EASC’s database/office services coordinator, earned her B.A. from IU in English and minored in music. She comes to EASC from a position in the Jacobs School of Music.

Outreach assistant Jeeyoung Shin is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Studies from the Department of Communication and Culture.  When she is not planning EASC’s East Asian Film Series or NCTA study tour, Jeeyoung is working on her dissertation on globalization and New Korean Cinema.

Katie Venit, the assistant outreach coordinator, works on the Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School workshop and the East Asian Colloquium series. After spending a year in rural Japan teaching English, Katie earned her M.A. from IU’s Department of Religious Studies with a focus on Japanese Buddhism.

Tara Wittmer earned a B.S. in Criminology and an A.S. in Evidence Technology and worked in law enforcement for ten years before coming to IU in 2005. She had been working in the School of Education until she joined EASC in September as accounting services coordinator. 

2007-08 POSCO NGO Fellows
This year EASC welcomes two leaders of Korean non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Chang Sun Kim and Jin Young Park, for a year of research and study on the Bloomington campus. Kim and Park are participants in the POSCO TJ Park Foundation NGO Fellows Program, which provides Korean NGO personnel a yearlong sabbatical at one of five universities (IU, Columbia, George Washington, Stanford, and British Columbia). Each fellow is pursuing research in his or her own area of interest—Kim on conflict resolution in public policy disagreements and Park on the effect that globalization has had on women in the workforce. 

Profile: Chang Sun Kim
As a student activist at the University of Daegu during Korea’s transition to a democratic state, Chang Sun Kim supported the establishment of popular presidential elections and labor unions. Even with these goals achieved, Kim believes that workers are still underrepresented in politics and that the rapid growth of democracy sometimes leads to violations of their rights. His experience with NGOs has convinced him that efforts to obtain representation for the working class should be directed towards educating the larger population to be successful. To this end, he has worked for thirteen years with the Citizens’ Coalition of Economic Justice, a large umbrella organization based in Seoul. Kim co-founded two branches of this NGO, one in Kyung-Ju in 1995 and one in Ulsan in 1998.

Simply increasing participation, however, will not lead to a smoothly operating government. As the public becomes more politically aware, conflicts between disagreeing parties are becoming more frequent, sometimes escalating to violence. Kim believes there is not yet a strong mechanism or system for solving these conflicts in Korea. While conducting research at IU he hopes to discover constructive ways to resolve these conflicts and accommodate different interests in the political process.

Kim advises IU students who would like to work for an NGO or non-profit organization to consider their lifestyles because “those working at an NGO are not working for the individual person or working for any small group, they are working for the public.” As a benefit, however, Kim notes that they may “get a sense of pride by being involved in the policy-making process for the people.”

Profile: Jin Young Park
Jin Young Park’s work with the Korean Women Workers’ Association (KWWA) and the Committee for Asian Women (CAW) based in Bangkok has convinced her of the importance of the women’s labor movement. “I believe that labor is one of the most important issues for women, regardless of whether they are in the labor market or not,” she says. Her fieldwork with the KWWA has taken her to many Asian countries to conduct and publicize her research on the situation of women workers, such as their working conditions, sexual harassment, physical and verbal abuse, and unemployment. With CAW she organized programs and surveys and helped to support initiatives by local groups in various Asian countries. To deepen her understanding on what she has experienced first-hand, while at IU she plans to conduct research into the ways in which globalization has affected women’s lives.

Through all this work she has become convinced of the importance of international solidarity for women fighting for better lives. “I met women workers and activists in Asia who are struggling for survival and are sincerely devoted to social movement through their work,” she says, adding that they taught her that by working together women can change the world, regardless of how difficult their current reality is. Despite the hardships she has seen, she values her work: “I believe that my experience as a social activist is my greatest asset. This experience has been the guiding light of my life—the pillar of my values and goals in life.”

Science and Technology in the Pacific Century (STIP) Update
Funded by the Illinois/Indiana U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant, the Science and Technology in the Pacific Century (STIP) project was initiated in Fall 2006 with the goal of exploring shifts in the location of leading scientific research towards East Asian institutions, which is likely in this century to affect scientific practice and have significant impact on East Asia and the West. STIP aims to build intellectual capacity and academic coordination on these topics by holding a series of events that will culminate in a national conference and curriculum development projects by 2010.

During 2006-07 the IU section of the STIP project focused on recruiting a leadership team and a broad group of participating faculty, securing funding for ethnographic research on science practice in East Asia, and developing an agenda for a 2007-08 faculty seminar. Robert Eno (chair, EALC) and David Hakken (director, International Activities, School of Informatics) were designated co-directors in Fall 2006. They are supported by a steering committee that includes Heidi Ross (director, EASC), Thomas Gieryn (chair, Sociology), and Sue Tuohy (Folklore and Ethnomusicology).

The steering committee has secured internal grants for two research initiatives—one for graduate student assistance in compiling and organizing bibliographical and statistical information and the other for ethnographic research visits to Japanese and Chinese laboratories in the summer of 2008. In February 2007 IU STIP events were formally initiated by interim IU-Bloomington Provost (now IU President) Michael McRobbie, who presented a keynote address, “The International Language of Science.” Public lectures and faculty seminars for 2007-08 are now underway, focusing on the following themes: conceptual issues in the geography of science (September); history of science in twentieth-century Japan and measures of science innovation across cultures (October); professional education of scientists in East Asia (November); the contemporary PRC scientific environment (December);  examples of major science initiatives in Japan (January); science administration in the PRC (March); and scientific innovation in PRC corporate contexts (April). Please visit the STIP website for information on upcoming events.

IL/IN East Asia Ethnography Dissertation Workshop
Eight Ph.D. candidates from across the country participated in the first annual IL/IN National Dissertation Workshop May 4-5 on East Asian ethnography. These workshops, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI grant to the Illinois/Indiana National Resource Center Consortium, feature IL/IN areas of national strength in two-day gatherings at which IL/IN faculty offer feedback on in-progress dissertations. Hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and led by Sara Friedman (Anthropology and Gender Studies, IU), Roger Janelli (Folklore and Ethnomusicology, IU), and Karen Kelsky (EALC and Anthropology, UIUC), each student presented a dissertation chapter, followed by comments and questions from the faculty. Topics ranged from the “commodification of fate” in South Korean fortunetelling, to the global transformation of the Japanese Mom-and-Pop store, to advertising and the construction of Chinese identity.

The next IL/IN National Dissertation Workshop will be held in May 2008 in Bloomington.  Details will be available in the early spring.

IL/IN Summer Seminar: East Asian Cinema in Transnational Contexts
On May 21 and 22, EASC hosted an IL/IN East Asian Summer Seminar on East Asian Cinema in Transnational Contexts, the first of a series of seminars funded by the Title VI grant. These summer seminars are designed to bring the faculty strengths of one campus to graduate and advanced undergraduate students of the other campus as well as to serve students at regional universities. Three faculty members from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , David Desser (Unit for Cinema Studies), France Gateward (Cinema Studies and African American Studies & Research), and Gary Xu (EALC and Comparative Literature), joined IU’s Greg Waller (Communication and Culture) in leading the seminar for eighteen students—eight from IU, three from UIUC, and seven from other universities in the Midwest. Through case studies of individual films and filmmakers and discussion of theoretical perspectives of globalization and new media, the seminar examined the ways in which East Asian cinema has historically engaged in transnational exchanges and a globalizing film culture.

Participants completed required readings before the seminar began so that class time could be devoted to interactive lectures and discussions of film history and methodologies. As one student commented, “I used to take a more textual approach, but this seminar introduced me to a variety of approaches—reception, distribution, and economics. Greg Waller’s presentation was very helpful, and it really opened up another perspective to me.” The seminar also provided valuable networking opportunities for students with similar interests from several universities. An IU student noted, “My biggest gain [from this seminar] is to be exposed to the work of other students and to have a chance to learn from and discuss with faculty members.”

The 2008 IL/IN Summer Seminar will take place next spring, hosted by UIUC. Details will be forthcoming.

STARTALK 2007: Chinese Pedagogy Institute
In June EASC hosted a two-week Chinese Pedagogy Institute (CPI) for fourteen practicing and prospective high school teachers pursuing secondary certification in Chinese. Directed by Jennifer Liu (EALC) with assistance from two visiting faculty, Michael Everson (Foreign Language Education, University of Iowa) and Claire Kotenbeutel (Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison), CPI provided instruction in effective methods and techniques of teaching Chinese, principles for selecting and developing instructional materials, curriculum design, implementation of lesson plans, and class management.

The first week took place at Bradford Woods, IU’s outdoor center, which provided a retreat-like environment ideal for intensive study and discussion of theoretical issues in Chinese pedagogy and the collaborative development of lesson plans. The second week was held at IU, where participants engaged in a teaching practicum with twelve high school students who had no experience in Chinese. In addition to the training, participants received four hours of graduate credit to apply towards their home states’ certification requirements. With support from IU’s Center for Language Technology and Instructional Enrichment (CeLTIE), CPI also helped participants document their growth and prepare e-portfolios to facilitate their certification.

This program was funded by STARTALK, a presidential initiative that supports summer programs in critical needs languages such as Chinese and Arabic.

National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA)
The Freeman Foundation recently awarded EASC approximately $496,000 to continue its coordination of NCTA Teaching about Asia seminars and study tours for middle and high school teachers in the Midwest and South. Since EASC co-founded NCTA in 1998, nearly 1,050 teachers from Alabama, Illinois, Indiana,  Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan, and, Minnesota have taken these thirty-hour introductory seminars on East Asian history, culture, and society taught by local East Asianist faculty. Spring 2008 seminars will be held in: Birmingham, AL; Chicago, IL; Columbus, IN; Lexington, KY; New Orleans, LA; Akron, OH; Marietta, OH; and Minneapolis, MN. For application information, go to the NCTA Web page.

NCTA Teaching about Asia Summer Seminar in Bloomington
EASC held a one-week residential NCTA Teaching about Asia seminar on the Bloomington campus in July. Instructor Paul B. Watt (Asian Studies, DePauw University) provided a broad overview of East Asian history and culture for the eighteen middle and high school teachers, mostly from rural Indiana. Participants took advantage of Bloomington’s many Asian resources, including curricular materials in EASC’s resource room, the Asian gallery at the IU Art Museum, and the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center. The seminar instructor was a favorite of the participants, with one describing Watt as “a gifted teacher and a ‘gentleman’ as defined by Confucius.”

NCTA Study Tour to China
Nineteen middle and high school teachers from the Midwest and South traveled to China for a Freeman Foundation-funded three-week NCTA study tour this summer. They were accompanied by Heidi Ross (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and director, EASC), tour leader Jessica Dzieweczynski (outreach assistant, EASC), faculty expert Kristin Stapleton (History, University of Kentucky), and curriculum coordinator Jenna Bergren (AP World History and History teacher, Fishers High School, Fishers, IN).

The tour took them to many historical and cultural sites in China, including the Forbidden City and Great Wall in Beijing, the Terra Cotta Warriors and the Muslim quarter in Xi’an, a silk factory in Suzhou, and a rural school in Shaanxi province. The experience of a study tour guided by East Asian specialists was enriching in ways beyond the intellectual—all returned home with cultural artifacts to share with their students and a renewed zeal for teaching. Information on the 2008 NCTA study tour to Japan and Korea, open only to NCTA Teaching about Asia seminar alumni, is available here.

Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School Workshop
In July EASC hosted its ninth annual workshop on Teaching East Asian Literature in the High School, with funding from the Freeman Foundation. Twenty-one teachers from around the country traveled to Bloomington for this intensive week of lectures, discussions, and hands-on activities  focusing on the literature, history, and culture of China, Japan, and Korea. They also participated in special sessions on ikebana and tai chi as well as a docent-led tour of the Asian gallery at the IU Art Museum. Upon completing the workshop, teachers created lesson plans designed to make works such as Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,” Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, and The Song of a Faithful Wife, Ch’unhyang come alive for high school students. Information on the 2008 summer workshop is available here.

East Asian Languages Standards Workshop for High School Teachers
On July 14 EASC held “New State Standards for East Asian Languages: Implications and Implementation,” a pedagogy workshop for Indiana high school teachers of Chinese and Japanese. The twenty-four participants attended morning sessions on the development of the new standards by Adriana Melnyk (World Languages Coordinator, Indiana Department of Education and lead developer of the IDOE’s World Language Standards) and Sadatoshi Tomizawa (Modern Languages and Classics, Ball State University and associate lead developer of IDOE’s East Asian Languages Standards). After lunch teachers attended language-specific breakout sessions, which included the sharing of standards-based lesson plans as well as presentations by IU Chinese and Japanese language coordinators Jennifer Liu and Yasuko Ito Watt. 

Fall 2007 IL/IN Cross-Campus Teaching Program
As part of its Title VI-funded IL/IN Cross-Campus Teaching initiative, EASC is sponsoring an EALC graduate seminar this fall in conjunction with a similar seminar offered by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois. The two parallel seminars are being taught synchronously—East Asian Scholarship (EALC E604) taught by Michael Robinson (EALC, IU) and the East Asia Graduate Certificate Seminar (EAPS AS 550) at Illinois, offering students an interdisciplinary look at the different questions and assumptions that have guided scholarship on East Asia. Both courses introduce students to East Asian specialists at their home institutions by including guest lectures in a variety of disciplines.  IU guest lectures are video-linked with the Illinois seminar, with those sessions taught jointly and students from both campuses taking part in discussions. 

East Asian Colloquium Series
This fall’s East Asian colloquium series kicked off on September 14 with a lecture by Toru Takahashi (Japanese Literature, University of Nagoya), a distinguished specialist of ancient Japanese courtly literature and arts. He presented the lecture “A Harem without Eunuchs: Women’s Lives and the Formation of The Tale of Genji.” While in Indiana, he also conducted research at the IU Art Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Judith Stubs, Pamela Buell Curator of Asian Art at the IU Art Museum, showed him an off-display folding screen decorated with six small paintings mounted onto the gold surface of the screen, purchased by the museum in 1968 from Robert Laurent, former sculpture professor in Fine Arts. Takahashi thought that some of the paintings were illustrations for The Tale of Genji that could date to as early as the sixteenth century, which would make the screen an important find for his research. He and his team of scholars are currently conducting research to identify the work. 

East Asian Career Night
Twenty-eight undergraduates gathered at the Career Development Center for East Asian Career Night on September 25 to hear a panel discussion on careers involving East Asia. Travis Selmier (Ph.D. in Political Science) spoke about his seventeen-year career in international equities. Christiana Stouder (M.A. in Second Language Studies) described how she helped to found a school for female migrant workers in rural China. She was followed by Scott O’Bryan (EALC and History), who told how he discovered his first job in Japan through networking. The panel discussion concluded with Sarah Pederson (director of advising, College of Arts and Sciences) sharing her experiences as an English teacher in Taiwan. The panel discussion was followed by a Q & A session and an opportunity to network with the presenters.

Emerging China: Threats, Challenges and Possibilities of a Rising Super Power
In September Tim Rich (Ph.D. in Political Science) taught a Lifelong Learning course titled Emerging China: Threats, Challenges, and Possibilities of a Rising Superpower through the School of Continuing Studies. This three-part course examined China’s relationship to the United States and to the world as it becomes an economic and political superpower. The class paid special attention to relations between China and Taiwan and the politics surrounding China’s relationship with Tibetan and Xinjiang ethnic minorities. “I found the class to be a great teaching experience,” Rich said. “The students were not only engaged but asked thoughtful questions.” EASC sponsors a Lifelong Learning course for Bloomington residents each fall.

Briefings on East Asia: Greensburg Seminars
To help Greensburg, IN residents prepare for the new $550 million Honda assembly plant and the arrival of Japanese Honda employees and their families, EASC offered four Japan-focused seminars on October 3 and 4.  Designed to further understanding about Japanese culture, business, and education, these seminars were taught by Susan Furukawa, a Greensburg native and a Ph.D. candidate in EALC. A two-part series, “Doing Business with Japan,” introduced Japanese business culture and etiquette to more than twenty members of the Greensburg business community.  These seminars were part of EASC’s Title VI-funded Briefings on East Asia program, which provides custom-designed seminars to those working in business, government, and other professional fields. A second series, “Understanding Japanese Education,” provided an orientation to the Japanese education system and values to fifty-five elementary school educators and staff. 

The Second Wave: Modern Japanese Prints from Bloomington Collections
On October 5 the IU Art Museum opened a special art exhibition titled The Second Wave: Modern Japanese Prints from Bloomington Collections. This exhibition runs through December 16 and features forty woodblock prints from the IU Art Museum’s own collection and from local collectors. Divided into two parts, “New Prints” (Shin Hanga) and “Creative Prints” (Sōsaku Hanga), The Second Wave explores the rejuvenation of activity and interest in woodblock prints in the twentieth century. The Second Wave is sponsored by the Thomas T. Solley Endowment for the Curator of Asian Art, the IU Art Museum’s Arc Fund, and EASC. For more information, click here.

Seminar on Translation: Shelley Fenno Quinn
On November 1 EASC co-sponsored an Institute for Advanced Study Seminar on Translation that welcomed home IU alumna Shelley Fenno Quinn (EALC, The Ohio State University) for a public lecture titled “Noh Master Zeami’s ‘Flower Passed Down from Mind to Mind’: Lost in Translation?” Fenno Quinn discussed the use of the word kokoro in the writings of seminal Noh playwright Zeami and the challenges scholars face in attempting to translate this word, which can mean “heart” or “mind” in English.

Olympic Dreams: East Asian Olympics from Tokyo to Beijing
Zhiwei Pan, a member of the Organizing Committee for the Beijing Olympic Games and winner of the Tony A. Mobley Distinguished Alumni Award from IU’s School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER), delivered the keynote address for the symposium “Olympic Dreams: East Asian Olympics from Tokyo to Beijing” on November 2. In his address, “New Beijing, Great Olympics: The Effects of the 2008 Olympic Games on Chinese Society,” Pan discussed the impact of the Games on daily life in Beijing. He also gave an overview of the preparations that have been made for the Games, including the development of the “Fuwa” mascots and the construction of new sports arenas.

Pan’s talk was preceded by two panels of experts. The first panel provided historical and socio-cultural perspectives on the Olympics in East Asia, focusing on the 1964 Games in Tokyo and the 1988 Games in Seoul, and included Scott O’Bryan (History and EALC), Soochul Kim (Institute of Communications and Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Elise Edwards (History and Anthropology, Butler University), as well as an introduction to the Beijing Games’ promotional images and music by Sue Tuohy (Folklore and Ethnomusicology). The second panel looked forward to the Beijing Olympics, with Marc Dollinger (Management, Kelley School of Business) speaking on its anticipated effect on entrepreneurial activity and Phil Henson (Kinesiology, HPER and director of track and field events for the 1996 Games in Atlanta) placing the Beijing Games in the context of the ancient history and philosophy of the Games.

IU East Asia News

The program will next be offered in summer 2009. For more information, visit the IU Overseas Study Web site.

Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business
In February 2007 the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business was established with the goal to document and analyze the patterns that emerge in the interaction between China’s political, economic, and international issues in a way that provides relevant information to scholars, the business community, and policymakers. Directed by Scott Kennedy (EALC and Political Science), RCCPB takes advantage of IU’s long-standing strength in the study of contemporary China from multiple disciplines and research traditions.
 
The new center’s inaugural event was held on September 7 with two addresses on the Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses, “Will U.S.-China Relations Survive an American Election Season?” and “Then and Now: Some Longer-Term Perspectives on Politics and Business in China Today,” both by Robert Kapp, former president of the U.S.-China Business Council. On October 24, RCCPB presented a roundtable discussion on the domestic and international aspects of the political situation in Burma titled “Burma’s Political Crisis: The Fate of the Saffron Revolution.” On November 6, Victor Yuan, chairman of Horizon Research Consultancy Group, delivered a talk titled “Looking Over the Horizon: Surveying Business and Social Life in China” about trends in business and social science polling in China.

Please visit RCCPB’s Web site for information on upcoming events.

Faculty Reports

Gardner Bovingdon (Central Eurasian Studies and EALC) gave a talk titled “Naming and Claiming in China and Taiwan: The Role of Representation in Modern Politics” at the Institute of Political Science at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. This fall he is a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. 

Paul Fischer (Religious Studies) (Ph.D., EALC, University of Chicago) is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies.  This fall he is teaching an introduction to East Asian religions and a course titled “Religion and Literature in Asia.” He will teach classes on Daoism and Zen in the spring. Fischer’s current research is centered on what he calls “personal self-cultivation,” which he defines as “ways of correctly aligning the self with the cosmos.” Although personal self-cultivation is common to all of East Asia, he is currently focusing on early Chinese manifestations.  Subsequent research will take him into later Chinese history, Korea, and Japan.

Ho-Fung Hung’s (Sociology) article “Changes and Continuities in the Political Ecology of Popular Protest: Mid-Qing China and Contemporary Resistance” recently appeared in China Information 21(2007). He presented a paper, “Elite Reproduction and Class Politics in Early Modern China: Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited,” at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in August. He also presented the paper “Rethinking Confucianism and Democracy: The Case of Neo-Confucianist State and Docile Protesters in Eighteenth-Century China” at the North American Chinese Sociologists Association annual meeting in the same month. He was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “A Rocky Road from Empire to Nation: The Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong Questions in China’s Modernity” at the Social Science History Association annual meeting in Chicago in November. In the same meeting, he chaired an Author Meets Critics panel on Kathleen Thelen’s book How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Sumie Jones (EALC and Comparative Literature) has served as one of two consulting editors for the four-volume Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, which was edited by Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Macmillan, 2007). Jones’ article, “Japan: Erotic Literature,” is included in the second volume. Her paper, “Lying about Flying: The Invention of Science Fiction and the Fictions of Colonialism in Modern Japan,” is forthcoming in Travel in Japanese Representational Culture: Its Past, Present, and Future: Proceedings of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies 8 (2007). Jones presented part of this paper at an EASC Colloquium in October.

Greg Kasza (EALC) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present his paper “Area Studies and Policy Research: The Quest for an East Asian Welfare Model” at the East Asian Social Policy research network conference in Tokyo in October.

RCCPB Director Scott Kennedy (EALC and Political Science) gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Indiana Association of Family and Consumer Sciences in September in Indianapolis. His talk “Made in China: Is the American Consumer Safe?” emphasized the responsibility of the Chinese government and producers, multinational firms, and the U. S. government with regard to product safety. He was also awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present his paper “Keeping the Door Open: Transnational Political Alliances and Chinese Trade Policy” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association this summer.

Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Linguistics) has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for a collaborative research project titled “Wh-interrogatives at the Prosody-Syntax-Pragmatics Crossroad,” which investigates correlations among sound, structure, and meaning in Wh-questions in Japanese. The project involves many co-researchers in Japan who specialize in phonetics, psycholinguistics, and dialectology, among other areas. Partly funded by the NSF grant, he organized the Workshop on Prosody, Syntax, and Information Structure 3, which was held in September on the Bloomington campus. The workshop attracted many top-rated researchers from the United States, Japan, and Europe as speakers and attendees. His research paper titled “When We Fail to Question in Japanese” is being published in S. Ishihara, M. Schmitz, and A. Schwarz (eds.), Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 9 (Potsdam, 2007). He also presented a poster titled “Prosody-Scope Correlation in Wh-interrogatives: Production and Perception Studies” with Yuki Hirose at the International Conference on Processing Head-final Structures at the Rochester Institute of Technology in September.

Yan Luo, a visiting professor from Tsinghua University, is working with Heidi Ross (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies) on the Faculty Research Support Program (FRSP)-funded project “Developing National Student Engagement Surveys for Chinese Secondary and Higher Education: Effective Practice for an Era of Mass Schooling.” The project will also involve a workshop for the Ministry of Education and pilot surveying at Beida and Tsinghua universities in Beijing in May. 

Misako Matsubara (EALC) joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer this fall. She is interested in language variations in Japanese, gender and language, second language acquisition, and Japanese pedagogy. She is currently exploring how and why young Japanese in Tokyo adopt regional dialects from other areas in their casual speech. She is also interested in teaching reading skills in relation to learning Chinese characters (kanji). This year Matsubara is teaching Elementary Japanese 1 and 2 and Third-Year Japanese 1 and 2.

Ethan Michelson’s (Sociology and EALC) article “Lawyers, Political Embeddedness, and Institutional Continuity in China’s Transition from Socialism” appeared in the American Journal of Sociology this September, a piece that focuses on the difficulties faced by lawyers in China. He also presented the paper “Dispute Processing in Urban and Rural China: Findings from Two Surveys” at the Conference on Dispute Resolution in China, held in Honolulu in September. The goal of the conference was to examine law in operation by drawing on recent empirical work that explores the way conflicts are addressed across a range of public and private forums and the development of mechanisms that seek to address citizen complaints and concerns.

Klaus Mühlhahn (History) participated as invited speaker in the Colonialism and Chinese Localities conference in Qingdao, China in September. He presented a paper titled “Negotiating the Nation: Colonialism and Resistance in Qingdao, 1897-1914.” His article“Visions of Order and Modernity: Crime, Punishment and Justice in Urban China during the Republican Period”has just been published in the volume Cities in Motion: Cost and Diaspora in Modern China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2007).

Masato Ogawa (Education, IU Kokomo) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present four papers at the National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference this fall: “Teaching about North Korea from a Human Rights Perspective: Frameworks for Curriculum and Instruction,” “International Abductions: North Korea is Not Our Home,” “Whose History?—North Korea in History Textbooks from Different Countries,” and “Social Studies Pre-service Teachers’ Knowledge and Notions of Citizenship.”

Jean Robinson (Political Science and EALC) was appointed the interim dean for the Hutton Honors College and the director of graduate studies for the Department of Political Science.

Richard Rubinger (EALC) presented a paper titled “Signs, Ciphers, and Seals: Literacy in Early Tokugawa Villages” at The Ohio State University in October.

Lynn Struve (History and EALC) was a visiting professor at Taiwan’s National Central University in May and June. She conducted a seminar in historical memory studies for faculty and graduate students and gave other talks for the NCU History Department and Humanities Center on early Qing history and the convergences between the humanistic study of memory and findings in neuroscience. She also spoke on late-Ming “dream culture” and the psychological approach to history for the Ming-Qing Study Group at the Academia Sinica and on the importance of historical memory in the study of the Ming-Qing transition for the History Institute of Tsinghua University. In September, as part of her participation in the IU Poynter Center seminar on Memory, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics, she delivered a paper titled “Using Dream Testimonies: In the Synapses of Historiography, Psychoanalysis, Ethics, and Brain Science.”  Two related articles by Struve are appearing this year: “Dreaming and Self-search during the Ming Collapse: The Xue Xiemeng Biji, 1642–1646” in T’oung Pao: International Journal of Chinese Studies 93(2007) and “Ancestor Édité in Republican China: The Shuffled Journal of Xue Cai (1595–1665),” in East Asian Library Journal 13:1(2007).

Michiko Suzuki’s (EALC) article “Consumption and Leisure: An Intratextual Reading of Hisao Jū-ran’s Kyarako san” was published in the Proceedings for the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 7(2006).

Yuan Wang, visiting professor from Northeast Normal University in Hong Kong and Fulbright Scholar affiliated with EASC, will be working with Heidi Ross (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies) on a project titled “International and Global Education in the U.S.” The project will evaluate the impact of the U.S. government on international education by examining the origins and history of federal support for international education. The project aims to make the U.S. experience in international education an example for China and other emerging powers.

Lin Zhou (EALC) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “Protocols of Love in The Dream of the Red Chamber” at the 2007 Modern Language Association Convention in December.

New Faculty Profile: Klaus Mühlhahn
Department of History
Klaus Mühlhahn did not always know he wanted to study Chinese history. In fact, when he enrolled in Freie Universität in Berlin, he did not know what to study so he signed up for either comparative literature studies or theater history (he cannot remember which).  But he is certain that the impetus for his shift to Chinese history came from a desire to study Chinese literature and language. He decided to enroll in a sinology course, beginning what would become a twenty-two-year-long journey to IU’s Department of History.

After obtaining his M.A., he received a five-year teaching position in the area of nineteenth-century colonialism in China and turned his doctoral focus to the German colony in Qingdao. In addition to a dissertation on the history of the German colony from a Chinese perspective, his research also presented him with a new area for study—the Chinese legal system. Specifically, he came to be interested in the history of crime, punishment, and the prison, and upon receiving a two-year research grant from the German Research Foundation he began to pursue his new research interest as a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. There he began his current project on the documentation of changes in the Chinese criminal justice system during the twentieth century. His manuscript reflecting this research, Criminal Justice in China—A History, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Following his two years at Berkeley, Mühlhahn moved to Finland where he spent the past three years as the head of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku. While there, he played a large role in rebuilding the program, including reinstating the doctoral program and reformatting the undergraduate track. He feels that the administrative focus of this position offered him the chance to try something different, and the less established nature of the program gave him creative freedoms not available at other universities.

As he had never before had the formal opportunity to teach at an American university, when IU’s Department of History contacted Mühlhahn about a job opening, he was intrigued. Although IU has a more established East Asian program than what he had encountered in Finland, he acknowledged the importance of continuing the process of growth within the program. “My hope is that I can bring some of my experiences from Finland . . . and contribute to the further development of the program.”

As for advice to future Chinese Studies scholars, Mühlhahn stresses the importance of language and language studies and “to simply be excited about studying China . . . to be open about the interesting things you can see and study in China.” “There’s so much to do, and so many dynamic things have to do with China,” he adds. “To this day, if I had to choose again, I think I would always choose to study China.”

This fall, Klaus Mühlhahn is teaching two courses in the Department of History, G378 Contemporary China and H675 Topics in Early China Studies.

New Faculty Profile: Kevin Tsai
Department of Comparative Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Program for Ancient Studies
As a boy in Taiwan, Kevin Tsai’s education focused on European culture: he learned to play the violin, he read Alexandre Dumas, and, although he also studied Tang poetry, the first poem he copied out was a German poem by Friedrich von Schiller. Studying about Asia didn’t occur to him then, and when he came to the United States he continued on a “Eurocentric” path. “To this day I still feel greater kinship with Roman literature than with Chinese literature,” he admits. Regardless, Tsai found that comparing the Classics to Chinese literature had more intellectual promise than that of “plowing the well-plowed field” studying only the Classics, and he left his graduate program in classical philology to attend Princeton University and study comparative literature.

Now at IU, Tsai’s major research interests are the comparative development of narrative in Eastern and Western literature, genre, gender, fictionality, and literary historiography. His papers published on Eastern literature, such as “Ritual and Gender in the Tale of Li Wa in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25(2005), augment those on Western literature, such as “Hellish Love: Genre in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae” in Helios 34(2007), in which he explores an unfinished epic about Proserpina’s abduction and marriage to Pluto, lord of the underworld. He is currently investigating the comparative development of narrative in traditional China and in the Classics and is completing a translation of the poetic corpus of Li Qingzhao, a major female Chinese writer who lived during the twelfth century. In addition to his research, this spring he will teach an undergraduate course called Dangers of Love in Chinese Literature. What exactly are the dangers of love? “You could have your vital essences sucked out,” Tsai explains. “You could lose everything. You could fall in love. You could be swallowed up by a monster.” Although this class will mainly work with Chinese literature, he and his students will also compare love cross-culturally and determine whether the understanding of love from Chinese literature could be applied universally. 

For those students who already know they want to study East Asian literature, Tsai passes along the same advice his mentor gave him: “There are some books in the library,” he said. “Go read all of them.” Although Tsai was initially put off by this advice, he came to realize over the years that there is no substitute for reading widely. He also recommends that students interested in Chinese literature watch more movies, especially early Jackie Chan flicks. “In some ways, martial arts films offer students a really interesting way to get into Chinese traditional culture,” he remarks. “Not only do martial arts films draw from traditional forms like the Peking opera, the moral world and the narrative elements are often more closely connected with pre-modern literature.”

Student Reports

Summer 2007 awardees
Curtis Ashton (Ph.D. in Folklore) received a FLAS to study Chinese at Brigham Young University.
Erika Kuever (Ph.D. in Anthropology) used her FLAS to study Chinese at the International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University.

2007-08 academic-year awardees
Suzy Cincone (M.A. in EALC) was awarded a FLAS for the study of Japanese. She is focusing her work on the experiences of Japanese who migrate to Southeast Asia.
Jen Pearl (M.P.A. in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs) received a FLAS to study Mandarin. She is interested in U.S.-China diplomacy efforts, in particular, how nonprofits, NGOs, the government, and the private sector conduct diplomacy.
Andrew Shimunek (Ph.D. in Linguistics) is using his FLAS to study Chinese with a research focus on the Chinese used during the Liao Dynasty (907—1125 C.E.) and other versions of Late Middle Chinese.

The FLAS program is administered by the U.S. Department of Education to make funds available for foreign language and area or international studies. The program has three main goals: (1) to assist in the development of knowledge, resources, and trained personnel for modern foreign language and area/international studies; (2) to stimulate the attainment of foreign language acquisition and fluency; and (3) to develop a pool of international experts to meet national needs. The benefits of the FLAS Fellowships include tuition fee remission, a stipend for living expenses, and enrollment in the graduate student health insurance program (for academic-year recipients only).

Applications for summer 2008 and academic year 2008-09 FLAS fellowships are due February 1, 2008. Information is available on the IU FLAS Web page.

Undergraduate News
Megan Greischar (Biology and Math) and James Hartzell (Philosophy, Computer Science, and EALC), both recent graduates, have been selected to participate in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) as Assistant Language Teachers. Greischar is working in Saitama prefecture, directly north of Tokyo, while Hartzell is in Kure-shi, Hiroshima prefecture.

Drew Machowicz (Linguistics, EALC, and French), the 2006-07 recipient of the EASC Undergraduate Award for Excellence in Chinese Studies, is studying this fall in Shanghai, China. Machowicz, who is interested in languages, plans to spend his spring semester in Egypt to study Arabic and the following summer in France or Quebec to study French. He is currently taking intensive third-year Chinese and a sociology class on Chinese society and is enjoying living in Shanghai, for both linguistic and cultural reasons. A blog of Drew’s experiences abroad can be found here.

Shannon Shapiro (English) took a position this fall as an English teacher at the Nova English school in Kumamoto City in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. She graduated from IU in May with a degree in English but became interested in Japan through a number of comparative literature courses she took with Sumie Jones (EALC and Comparative Literature).

Graduate Student News
Charles Andrews (Ph.D. in EALC) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “The Merchant Courier Inokuchiya and the Politics of Communications in Tokugawa Japan” at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs in October.

Yu-Min Chen (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “Body, Money and Power in Feudal China: Ideological Mutation in Eileen Chang’s Golden Cangue” at the Southeast Conference Association for Asian Studies in January.

This summer Christopher Frey (Ph.D. in Education) successfully defended his dissertation on Ainu schooling in the Meiji Period. He is now an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Greg Johnson (Ph.D. in EALC) presented “The Mobilization of American Childhood during World War I” at the biennial conference of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth in June at Linköping University in Sweden. He also presented “Mapping the Maternal Space in Kyoko Mori’s Polite Lies” at the Language Culture Association of Japan’s annual conference at Senshu University in Tokyo in July.

David Nelson (Ph.D. in History) defended his dissertation this fall on early modern crime and punishment in Kanazawa. He is now an instructor in the History and Philosophy Department at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN.

Hanyoung Park (Ph.D. in Linguistics) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “Neutralization in the Perception and Production of English Coda Obstruents by Korean Learners of English” at the 154th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in November.

Joanne Quimby (Ph.D. in EALC and CMLT) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present her paper “Women’s Poetry vs. Feminist Poetry: The Women’s Poetry Movement, Japanese Feminism and Itō Hiromi” at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs in October.

In September Tim Rich (Ph.D. in Political Science) taught a Lifelong Learning course titled Emerging China: Threats, Challenges, and Possibilities of a Rising Superpower through the School of Continuing Studies. He also received an EASC conference travel grant to present his paper “Pushing the Boundaries: Cross-Strait Relations since Taiwan’s Democratization” at the American Political Science Association this summer.

Jeeyoung Shin (Ph.D. in Communication and Culture) presented a lecture titled “New Korean Cinema and Cultural Hybridity: Transnational and Trans-cultural Dialectics in the Process of Globalization” for the Asian Culture Center’s Monday Table Topics series. The presentation addressed the construction of cultural hybridity and its manifestations in new Korean cinema.

Nicole Willock (Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present her paper “Negotiating New Territory—The Life of Tshetan Zhabdrung Jigme Rigpe Lodro (1910-1985)” at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in November.

Ran Zhang (Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Educational Psychology) was awarded an EASC conference travel grant to present “Anti-Sexual Harassment Policies and Practices in Educational Institutions in China” at the Gender and History in China conference this winter.

Student Profile: Tim Rich
On one end of the spectrum is North Korea. With its secretive government and closed borders, its mystery appeals to the tourist in Tim Rich (Ph.D. in Political Science), who is curious and adventurous enough to consider visiting North Korea one day in the name of ground-level international diplomacy. “There’s something very appealing about seeing a country that sees very few outsiders,” he explains. “The few Koreans that you would be allowed to meet would realize that Americans aren’t evil, so there are positives . . . as long as you don’t cause an international incident.” On the other end of the spectrum is Taiwan, which appeals to the researcher in Rich. He has found Taiwanese government officials to be surprisingly helpful about providing data. “If you contact a Taiwanese official, you’ll probably get a response in a few days,” he says. “They’ll always send you data, and I thought that this is something I’d be interested in continuing. It’s amazingly quick.” It was this ease of acquiring data for research that first made Rich consider Taiwanese politics and cross-strait relations as a future path for research.

His interest in Taiwan deepened as he thought more about his dissertation work on political parties. Although Taiwan has a strong party system, it has been the focus of very few comparative studies. This interest has provided him with one-of-a-kind experiences, such as meeting the president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, in 2006 as a member of a mayoral election observation tour organized by the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, a U.S.-based Taiwan advocacy organization.

Not everything comes easy, however, and part of Rich’s duties as co-president of the Department of Political Science Graduate Student Association is to help his fellow graduate students prepare for the job market. Through his position, he encourages graduate students to publish papers and present at conferences, beginning with regional conferences to build confidence before moving on to large national conferences.

He offers similar advice for submitting papers, observing that graduate students could save time by sending only the very best papers to the upper-tier journals.  “If you think you have a great idea, shoot high, and if they reject you, move your way down and take into account their suggestions,” he says. “If you don’t care about a piece but want to get it published, send it to a less-respected journal. If it gets rejected then you know it won’t go very far, and you’ll have saved time.” Another tactic he offers is to submit to foreign journals that tend to receive fewer submissions from Americans and may be more likely to accept them. “You should shoot higher later, but you need at least one thing when you go on the market,” he advises. “Anything over that makes you look good.”

Upcoming Events

Science and Technology in the Pacific Century (STIP) Spring Semester Event
This spring the focus of the Science and Technology in the Pacific Century (STIP) project will be on conducting field studies in Asia, in preparation for the project team’s ethnographic research visits to laboratories in Japan and China this summer. The first STIP event of the semester will be a January 18 dialogue between Sharon Traweek (History, UCLA) and Joan Fujimura (Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison), both of whom have been important pioneers in this area. A panel of IU bench scientists with experience working in Asia will comment on their presentations, followed by a training session on January 19.  The training session will be oriented in part toward Partnerships across the Pacific (PxP), the first collaborative project spawned by STIP, which uses ethnographic techniques to develop better information about and programs for U.S.-Asia university partnerships.

East Asian Film Series
The East Asian Film Series continues next semester with the theme of “Monsters and the Monstrous.” All films will take place Saturday evenings at 7:00 p.m. in Woodburn Hall Room 101.
January 26: R-Point (Korea, 2004)
February 9: Rampo Noir (Japan, 2005)
February 23: Re-cycle (Hong Kong, 2006)
March 1: Epitaph (Korea, 2007)
March 22: Death Note (Japan, 2006)
April 12: Silk (Taiwan, 2006)

Midwest Japan Seminar in Bloomington
On February 23 the Midwest Japan Seminar will convene at IU Bloomington to discuss two papers. David Frost (History, Xavier University), a specialist on the history of sports celebrities in Japan and their impact on Japanese understandings of the human body, will present “‘Japan’s Number One’ Goes to War: Baseball, Militarization, and Memory.” Christopher D. Scott (Asian Languages and Cultures, Macalester College) will present a paper titled “Ghost Writing:  Kim Sok-pom and the Specter of Japanese Colonialism,” an excerpt from his current book project, “Invisible Men:  Race, Masculinity, and Zainichi Korean Subjectivity in Postwar Japan.” This event is co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation.

Founded in 1970, the Midwest Japan Seminar meets five times a year at different midwestern institutions to discuss two papers. This concentrated focus allows scholars to offer and receive more in-depth critique of their papers than they would receive at a larger meeting.

The seminar will be open to any interested individual and will take place from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Faculty Room of the IMU University Club. More details will be available in January.

Monsters and the Monstrous in Modern Japanese History and Culture
EASC’s Monsters and the Monstrous in Modern Japanese History and Culture workshop will take place March 21-22 on the Bloomington campus. Directed by Michiko Suzuki (EALC) with funding from the Toshiba International Foundation, this is the second in a series of workshops that examines the cultural role played by monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures in Japan. While the first workshop in March 2007 explored monsters and the monstrous in premodern Japanese history and culture, this workshop will focus on the modern period, beginning with the question of what becomes of premodern Japanese monsters during a time of fresh contact with Western-based ideas and then tracing discourses on monsters from the late nineteenth century through contemporary times. Participants will include historians and art historians, scholars of Japanese religions, and specialists in literature, folklore, anthropology, and cultural studies.

4th Annual Midwest Conference on East Asian Thought
IU will host the 4th Annual Midwest Conference on East Asian Thought April 26-27. Bringing together scholars and graduate students from around the nation, this conference enables participants and audience members to engage in conversation about the most recent scholarly developments in all aspects of East Asian thought.

This year, the keynote speaker is Edward Slingerland (Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, University of British Columbia). He has written on numerous topics, including cognitive linguistics, comparative ethics, and the relationship between science and the humanities. The conference is co-sponsored by EASC and the Departments of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and EALC.

________________________________________