East Asian Studies Faculty Promoted

May 23, 2022

One professor in the Department of East Asian Studies has been promoted, demonstrating excellent performance in teaching, service and research.

 

Dr. Scott Gregory is promoted from Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor.

 

Gregory is a scholar of Chinese literature, with special interest in late imperial vernacular fiction and its intersection with the culture of print. His book Bandits in Print (Cornell University Press, forthcoming) concerns different manifestations of the sixteenth-century work The Water Margin and the reading practices surrounding them. He has also published on how novels of the Ming Dynasty conceived of their own historical era. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2012. Before coming to Arizona, he spent two years as a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore. He has also lived in Taipei and Kyoto.

 

EAS Award Ceremony 2022

May 6, 2022

2022 Awards Winners

Charles O. Hucker Founders Award

Justin Mackie

Ming Sun

Charles O. Hucker Founders Award Honorable Mentions

Elizabeth Leong

Etienne Thompson

Libby Merchant

The Barbara Blair Prize

Isabella Anghel

Jamie Peterson

Japan Foundation Award
Ashlynne Floyd
 

Korean Studies Award
Ander Embrey

Jessica Louise Vandling
 

 


 

EAS Award Ceremony

When
4 – 5:30 p.m., May 6, 2022
Where
Learning Services Building Courtyard

EAS AWARD CEREMONY
Celebration for Graduate Students
and
Graduating Seniors

Come join us as we celebrate the achievements of our outstanding students.

Attachments

Interdisciplinary Edo: Towards an Integrated Approach to Learning and Teaching Early Modern Japan

When
9 a.m. – 3:30 p.m., May 6, 2022
Where
ENR2. Rm. S215

This workshop seeks to bring together scholars from across the United States, Japan and
Europe to think across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward an integrated approach
to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, art historical, and a
variety of other perspectives into account, we hope to create a productive forum for a new,
transdisciplinary conversation on political formation, social interaction, and cultural
proliferation under the Great Peace of the Tokugawa regime.

SEE THE COMPLETE SCHEDULE: edojapan.arizona.edu

Sponsored by the generous support from:
Japan Foundation, The University of Arizona College of Humanities and
the Department of East Asian Studies

Attachments

EAS Graduate Student Collaboration

When
11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m., April 1, 2022

Graduate Student Collaboration

Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of EAS graduate students.

There will also be time provided for department updates and feed back.

Light refreshments (pizza and drinks) provided.

When: April 1, 2022

Where: LSB Courtyard

Time: 11:30AM-1:30PM

*This is a student retention and recruitment event.

Attachments

EAS Colloquium Series - The Alienated Author: Alternate Visions of Authorship in Early Chinese Five-Syllable Poetry

When
5 – 6 p.m., April 14, 2022
Where
Zoom Meeting ID: 85720315147
Join us as Dr. Lucas Bender discusses The Alienated Author: Alternate Visions of Authorship in Early Chinese Five-Syllable Poetry. Though early five-character shi 詩-poetry is a highly formulaic, often-anonymous, likely performance-oriented artform, a number of the earliest surviving poems are attributed to writers who also wrote in other genres wherein a robust concept of individual creative authorship prevailed. Given this context, we should not read this corpus as simply naïve, as scholars sometimes have. Instead, much of it represents a deliberate abjuration of the role of the individual creative “author,” an abjuration that is in fact often discussed, justified, and theorized in surviving early poems.
Attachments

Online symposium on Jiangnan Buddhist Traditions

When
3 – 7:30 p.m., Dec. 9 – 11, 2021
Where
https://conferences.cbs.arizona.edu/jiangnan-symposium/

2021 CONFERENCE
Thursday, December 9, 2021 to Saturday, December 11, 2021
Zoom (please register https://conferences.cbs.arizona.edu/jiangnan-symposium/ to receive zoom link to the symposium)

Hosted by Center for Buddhist Studies and Department of East Asian Studies, College of Humanities, The University of Arizona
Organized by Jiang Wu and Jennifer Eichman
Sponsored and Funded by Lingyin and Pu Yin Buddhist Studies Lecture Series, Center for Buddhist Studies, The University of Arizona

The Jiangnan region in China was an important driver of cultural, economic, and social change during the early modern period. At the same time, it served as an incubator of early modern Buddhist innovations that spread both locally, nationally, and transnationally. This symposium brings together scholars of Ming-Qing Jiangnan Buddhist, Daoist, and other related religious traditions to explore the significance of Buddhist innovations in the Jiangnan region from elite Buddhist doctrine, popular playscripts and precious scrolls to art, ritual, and institutional culture. Such scholarly explorations will improve our understanding of how Buddhist traditions were woven into the social and economic fabric of the Jiangnan region and further allow for a greater synthesis of the various threads that tied the region together.

Alan Cole's Talk on Chan Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty

When
4 p.m., Nov. 3, 2021
Where
https://arizona.zoom.us/j/81909763760

 

Join the University of Arizona Center for Buddhist Studies for our 
Pu Yin Lecture Series Fall 2021 No. 2 [Zoom event]


TRUTH IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: SEDUCTIVE WRITING AND THE BIRTH OF CHAN (ZEN) BUDDHISM IN THE TANG DYNASTY

Dr. Alan Cole, Independent scholar
Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021 at 4:00 PM Arizona Standard Time

Other time zones include:

4:00 PM (PST) (Los Angeles)
7:00 PM (EST) (New York)
11:00 PM (GMT) (London) 
7:00 AM (Thurs. Sept. 30) (CST) (Beijing)|
8:00 AM (Thurs. Sept. 30) (JST) (Tokyo)

Please verify the time in your area via a time zone calculator as Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time. 

Zoom link for the event: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/81909763760


Description:

This talk reconsiders the origins of Chan (Zen) Buddhism through a critical reading of surviving textual evidence. Most modern historians of Chan assume that Chan Buddhism emerged in China in the 5th or 6th century after the “semi-legendary” Bodhidharma and his disciples began sharing their wisdom and meditation styles with a select set of “practitioners,” out in China’s hinterland.  Modern historians also assume that these proto-Chan groups subsequently came to the capitals Luoyang and Chang’an where they promoted a whole new style of practicing Chinese Buddhism that came to be known as the “Chan school” (禪宗). 

The surviving textual evidence, when read critically, suggests a much more complicated historical process behind the emergence of Chan Buddhism. This talk briefly explores four early Chan texts to reveal how they work as seductive literary gambits, designed to win public support for the claim that this or that master was really a descendent of the Buddha. In this view, it was the Chan historians who invented Chan, and not the various masters who are celebrated within these various Chan genealogies. The final section of the talk will briefly explore parallels between early Chan genealogies and the oldest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, to show how, in both cases, images of patriarchy were woven into seductive historical narratives to make it seem as though perfect truth and tradition were fully available in the present, provided one properly engages the designated authorities.


Alan Cole received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan with a dissertation titled “Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism,” which was later published by Stanford University Press (1998) under the same title. Dr. Cole has taught at Lewis & Clark College, the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana), the University of Oregon, and Harvard University.  His most recent book is Patriarchs on Paper: A Critical History of Chan Literature (University of California Press, 2016).
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