UA alumna Michelle Yang, a writer focusing on mental health and wellness whose work has appeared in HuffPost, HelloGiggles and Mochi Magazine, has published a new article for InStyle about Asian stereotypes. She says the piece drew on what she learned in a course about Asian-American film and literature, taught by Dian Li, Professor of East Asian Studies. Read the article here.
Two College of Humanities professors are among 27 UA employees selected to participate in the 2019-20 Academic Leadership Institute.
Carine Bourget, Professor in the Department of French and Italian and Acting Director of the School of International Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and Jiang Wu, Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies and Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, are Fellows in the yearlong program designed to build the capacity of current and future University leaders.
The Academic Leadership Institute is a partnership between the Office of the Provost and the Division of Human Resources. The cohort is selected through a competitive application process, which looks at leadership potential, commitment to diversity and inclusion, and interest in enhancing the whole of the University community. More than 100 applicants are evaluated each year by the ALI advisory board. See the full list of Academic Leadership Institute Fellows here.
UA College of Humanities researchers are spending four weeks this summer in China on a Fulbright-Hays grant to provide a group of K-16 educators with insights into Chinese culture, language and education.
Awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant of $88,263, Wenhao Diao, an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, is leading the project, with support from the UA’s Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy, or CERCLL, which is also funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
The participants in the project are diverse, teaching at a variety of levels, from elementary school to community college, from Tucson and Phoenix, as well as Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio.
“Other programs are mostly for language teachers. We’re primarily doing this for teachers who aren’t language teachers, but in humanities and social sciences,” Diao said. “The goal is to help them establish knowledge and awareness about Chinese history, culture and language that they can decide how best to bring into their classroom.”
The program began at the UA with on-campus language instruction, workshops and teleconferencing with Chinese educators. In China, the group is at Shanghai’s East China Normal University as host through its Global Education Center.
“There’s a built-in peer component,” Diao said. “Each teacher is paired with a local teacher in China and we’ll be visiting schools and hearing from professors whose research deals with education. We’re trying to show them this perspective that’s different and get them knowledge about Chinese culture and society through the perspective of education.”
The four weeks in China will include language classes, field trips, lectures and small group workshops, and continue the one-on-one exchange with Chinese K-16 educators. The goal is for participating educators to effectively incorporate their first-hand experience from China into humanities and social sciences curricula in K-16 schools in Arizona, and to prepare students for an increasingly globalized world.
The local teachers on the trip range from elementary school to high school to Pima Community College. For the teachers of lower grades, what they are able to bring to their classrooms after the program is likely to be the first exposure their students will have with Chinese language and culture.
“This project is a curriculum-building trip, and the teachers will come out with lesson plans that are tailored to what they are doing in their own classes, but which will also be shared with a national community of educators through CERCLL’s website,” said Kate Mackay, Associate Director of CERCLL, one of 16 Title VI Language Resource Centers across the nation. “The knowledge and resources that they’ll gain from the trip will be able to add many authentic insights for the teachers, and for their students as well.”
Week one will be an overview of China’s family structure, education, and history; week two focuses on educational equality and social justice; week three covers China’s educational social progresses and resistance; and week four will center on the historical, current and future potential for engagement with globalization in the educational sector.
“The project is designed to use education, broadly defined, as a topic and perspective,” Diao said. “There are social issues reflected in education, and issues with globalization. There are a lot of elements involved that we can talk about using the angle of education.”
College of Humanities Dean Alain-Philippe Durand and Center for Buddhist Studies Director Jiang Wu signed an agreement with the Maitreya Culture & Education Foundation to create a Maitreya Library at the University of Arizona.
The agreement, signed in Hong Kong last week during an award ceremony hosted by Professor Andrew Wong of the Maitreya Culture & Education Foundation, secures a gift to the UA to create the Maitreya Library, which will be one of more than 30 created by the foundation.
The award ceremony honored winners of an essay competition intended to foster cultural exchange and understanding. The essay competition, “Ci - Chinese character of Compassion,” drew 200 entries from 39 institutions in four countries and regions. Two UA students, undergraduate Rob Lisak and graduate student Yi Liu presented their essays in the ceremony and received their awards.
The event commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Maitreya Culture & Education Foundation, and Durand presented a gift to Prof. Wong on behalf of the College of Humanities and the Center for Buddhist Studies.
James A. Millward, Georgetwon Uniniversity
James Millward is Professor of Intersocietal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He is an internationally recognized commentator on issues regarding ethnic policies in China’s northwest region. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.
James A. Millward, Georgetown University
James Millward is Professor of Intersocietal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He is an internationally recognized commentator on issues regarding ethnic policies in China’s northwest region. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.
Keenly aware of living in a small archipelago on the easternmost periphery of the Asian continent, premodern Japanese Buddhist thinkers struggled to define their own place vis-à-vis the great Buddhist countries of India and China. Alternative representations of Japan, both as a marginal, benighted backwater, and as a superior Buddhist realm, were creatively juxtaposed to assert the claims of rival teachings. In the process, Buddhist norms and concepts of Japan became
mutually formative.
Jacqueline Stone, Religious Studies, Princeton University
Jacqueline Stone is professor of Japanese Religions in the Religion Department of Princeton University. Her chief research field is Japanese Buddhism of the medieval and modern periods. She is especially interested in the intersections of Buddhist thought and social practice. Her most recent book is Right thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan (2016).
In 1654, the Chinese Linji ( Jp. Rinzai) Chan master Yinyuan Longqi ( Jp. Ingen Ryūki; 1592-1684) left his exalted position as abbot of the historic Buddhist monastery of Wanfusi on Mount Huangpo in the southern Chinese province of Fujian and made the perilous journey to Nagasaki, Japan, together with some twenty disciples, ten artisans, and assistants. Soon thereafter he founded Japan’s third Zen sect, Ōbaku and built his sect’s head temple at Manpukuji in Uji, south of the imperial capital of Kyoto. This simple act of defiance, fleeing the repressive, foreign Manchu warriors who established the Qing dynasty, set in motion momentous changes to the Buddhist world in Japan and beyond that affected the course of diverse aspects of Japanese intellectual and artistic life, popular culture, and even the basic diet of Japanese citizens up to the present. This talk will introduce the various types of Chinese material culture Ingen brought to Japan and illuminate their legacy.
These imports included a large trove of rare religious and secular books, Chinese Ming-style Buddhist temple architecture (made of teak wood imported from Thailand, originally bound for Formosa on a Dutch ship), previously unknown styles of Buddhist and secular paintings, devotional imagery representing popular Chinese deities and personages, and foodstuffs, such as kidney beans (known in Japan as Ingen mame), originally a product of the Americas that was exported to Europe, then China, via the extensive global trade networks of the 16th century, and sencha (unfermented green leaf tea), both of which have become staples of Japanese cuisine.
Patricia Graham, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas
Patricia Graham, a former professor and museum curator, is currently an adjunct research associate at the University of Kansas Center for East Asian Studies and a consultant and certified appraiser of Asian Arts. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, the Asian Cultural Council, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and elsewhere.
In this lecture, I will examine the materiality of the Great Stupa at Sanchi in order to show how the imagery of the stupa articulates a rhetoric of dynamic Buddhist life and thought. Particularly, I will demonstrate that the imagery displayed on the gates of the site reproduce the sumptuousness of royal life and the violence that is inherent in the royal lifestyle. This is contrasted with the ethical ideals embodied in the Buddha and his remains that are housed in the heart of the stupa. Finally, I will suggest that these two ways of being Buddhist in the world are mediated through the narratives of the Jatakas that contain much of the vivid imagery outside the stupa and through space both providing a means to bridge the beauty and violence of “this world” to the goals of the Buddhist teachings.
Caleb Simmons, Religious Studies University of Arizona
Dr. Caleb Simmons (Ph.D. in Religion, University of Florida) specializes in religion in South Asia, especially Hinduism. His research specialties span religion and state-formation in medieval and colonial India to contemporary transnational aspects of Hinduism. His book Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India, 1782-1868, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, examines how the late early modern/early colonial court of Mysore reenvisioned notions of kingship, territory, and religion, especially its articulations through devotion. He is currently working on a second monograph, Singing the Goddess into Place: Folksongs, Myth, and Situated Knowledge in Mysore, India that examines popular local folksongs that tell the mythology of Mysore’s Chamundeshwari and her consort Nanjundeshwara.
This talk aims to illuminate the dynamics of the post-World War I reconfiguration of the Japanese empire through the lens of Okinawa prefecture. It brings together four sets of works: migration studies, research on the agrarian question, colonial studies and social reproduction theory.
Between 60-72% of Okinawa’s migrant workers were male. The increased burdens for female agriculturalists that accompanied this were exacerbated by the state’s protectionist policies. These policies intensified the burdens that women of Okinawa’s agrarian villages shouldered.
The ledgers of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Farm Household Survey provide us with fragments through which the lives of these women can be imagined. This talk considers how scholars might grapple with the silences that dominate the archival record of women’s lives in wartime Okinawa.
Wendy Matsamura, Department of History - UC San DiegoDr. Matsumura received her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2007.
The completion of her first book, The Limits of Okinawa (Duke University Press, 2015) and research for her next project was supported by a Fulbright research fellowship in Kyoto from 2012-2013. She is currently working on two major research projects: the first on the unfolding of transnational labor struggles across Japan’s prewar sugar empire and the second on the emergence of the concept of surplus labor in Japanese social scientific discourse. Dr. Matsumura will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the development of class antagonisms, gender oppression and racialized discourses in the Japanese empire. She values the diverse range of life experiences, political commitments and learning styles that her students bring to the study of modern Japan.
