On May 3, we held our annual awards dinner to celebrate the winners of this year’s Hucker Award and Blair Prize. The Hucker Founder’s Award is named after Professor Charles O. Hucker, who, in 1956 established the Oriental Studies Department at UA, the predecessor of our East Asian Studies Department. To honor his memory, in 1997 his widow, Mrs. Myrl Hucker, generously established the Charles O. Hucker Founders Award for Excellence in Chinese Studies. This award has been given annually since then to honor a student for academic achievement in the field of Chinese. This year’s recipient is Tolan Thornton. At the UA Tolan pursued four majors, while maintaining a 4.0 GPA. After graduation he will continue his studies of Chinese at Middlebury College for 8 weeks under a Kathryn Davis Fellowship. He next plans to attend the 9-month University of California Berkeley Inter-University Program at Qinghua University in Beijing as part of an intensive immersion program in Mandarin. Afterwards, he hopes to live and work in Asia before pursuing a graduate degree.
The Blair Prize in Japanese Studies, started in 2007, and is named after Barbara Bowman Blair. In 1981 Mrs. Blair founded JAST, the Japan-America Society of Tucson, and worked tirelessly to promote Japan-American understanding, sponsoring visiting Japanese officials and students, teaching about Japanese culture, and acting as consultant for numerous Japanese and American companies. The Blair Prize was established to honor the academic accomplishments of UA students, but also in the hope that the recipients will, in their own individual ways, contribute in the future to cross-cultural understanding. This year’s recipient is Caitlin Milder. Caitlin majored in both Physiology and East Asian Studies, with a minor in Chemistry, and was a member of the honors college, maintaining a 4.0 GPA. She studied abroad at Waseda University, and aims to serve at the international level in the field of Public Health. To that end she has gained admission to graduate school at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
From left to right: Tolan Thornton, Philip Gabriel (Head of EAS), and Caitlin Milder.
Prof. Hai Ren is one of the winners of a 2012 Collaboration and Innovation Grant from The Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry.
His research project is entitled "The Precariat: An Intellectual History and Digitally Enhanced Learning." Prof. Ren explains: "Recently, scholars in many disciplines begin to argue for the emergence of the precariat, a human subject who lives precariously in the context of contemporary globalization, economic change, and social insecurity. They argue that a comprehensive understanding of this new human subject may potentially enable scholars to further explore the human condition and create links among debates that are usually conducted separately. This emerging scholarship has yet to address many basic questions. How is the figure of the precariat different historically from other similar figures (like the proletariat) who have been theorized by critical thinkers and philosophers since the late nineteenth century? How does the idea of the precariat become legible and legitimate through particular forms of narrative, narration, and media? And how is a precariat recognized in the practice of everyday life? This project will fill the gap in the scholarship by addressing these questions."
Prof. Ren's research team, composed of faculty and graduate students from the Departments of East Asian Studies and Electrical & Computer Engineering, will "examine the history of the precariat as an intellectual idea, create an interactive multimedia digital application that optimizes the experience of learning/thinking about that history, and conduct fieldwork to understand the manifestation of precarity in everyday life. The project will generate new knowledge on the precariat, and produce a model for integrating digital and design technologies into the creation of an engaged learning/thinking experience."
Congratulations to Prof. Ren for winning this prestigious award!
The 10th Annual Tucson Japanese Speech Contest was held at Pima Community College East Campus on April 21st. Fourteen students from the UA East Asian Studies Japanese Language Program competed with nineteen other students from Pima Community College and Toltecalli High School. This was the highest number of participants from the UA in the ten year history of this contest. Dr. Mariko Karatsu, Director of Japanese Language Program, also took part as one of the opening speakers.
All of the students worked very hard preparing for this contest and their hard work showed on stage. U of A students brought home a 1st place award, a 3rd place award, an honorable mention and two Judge’s awards. Photo: Joy Chen (left) won first place and Darryl Hutchinson (right) won an Honorable mention in the JPN 102 category. Darryl is an EAS major.
It is not an easy thing to participate in a foreign language contest – even more so in front of a large audience. All of the participants should be acknowledged and commended for their effort and their spirit in facing this challenge. It is hoped that all participants feel a sense of accomplishment and excitement and use this experience as a spring board for their future language learning. Congratulations, everyone!
Previous EAS Newsletters are available below
EAS News, Spring 2011
EAS News, Fall 2010
EAS News, Spring 2010