2016 2017 annual enewsletter spring...
TRANSCRIPT
Asian Studies Program 2016-2017 Annual eNewsletter
Spring 2017
2
2016-2017 in numbers
Students in AS classes 210
AS courses 23
# Coursework Disciplines 8
AS Majors 20
AS Minors 17
Guest Speakers 10
% AS Students Abroad 25
Study Abroad Funding 4
Students @ Asia Day 600
Contents Asia @ Noon 4
Asia Day 3
Cosponsorships 7
Contact Us 12
Faculty News 9
Research Awards 5, 9
Study Abroad 6
Undergraduate News 8 Stay Connected!
Visit our new Asian Studies Program
website site for news and events
announcements, student, alumni,
and faculty profiles, and up-to-date
information about Asian Studies at
UB!
asianstudies.buffalo.edu
Letter from the Director
We had another
productive year
with significant
achievements from
Asianist faculty and
students across
departments and
decanal units. We have also
experienced noticeable growth and
development in our program.
Beginning with our fall faculty
symposium on ‘Language,
discourse, and culture in Asia,’ we
held or cosponsored 16 academic
colloquia featuring both UB faculty
and prominent invited speakers in
the field. The number of our majors
and minors increased 40% over last
year, and they were able to enroll
in the increasing number of Asian
Studies courses that we cross-listed
with other departments in a wide
range of humanities and social
science disciplines. This year we
created a new joint major with
Economics, and we revised our
major requirements to align them
with our focus on East and South
Asia. We take pride in being a locus
of the two current key words of UB:
internationalization and
interdisciplinary.
Some of our core faculty have
retired or are following
opportunities elsewhere, but at the
same time, new Asia-focused
faculty members are joining UB.
They help us to continue our
mission of educating our students
about Asia and solving global
problems from an interdisciplinary
perspective. Our DUS, Nona Carter,
is moving to New Mexico, our ASAC
Chair Jeannette Ludwig has retired,
and one of our core faculty
members, Jang Wook Huh, has
taken a position in University of
Washington in Seattle. We thank
these gifted and devoted members
for their service to the program.
We also welcome our new faculty.
(continued on page 3)
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Letter from the Director (continued)
(continued from page 2)
Yan Liu joined the Dept. of History and teaches our core
courses in Asian history, Nicolas Bommarito in
Philosophy does research on Asian religion and teaches
Asian Philosophy, and English and Geography are hiring a
new Asianist faculty in the fall. Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen in
Geography has become the new Advisory Council Chair
and Mitsuaki Shimojo in Linguistics will serve as the
Director of Undergraduate Studies. We congratulate two
of our core faculty for their promotions: Walter Hakala
(English) to Associate Professor and Kristin Stapleton
(History) to full Professor.
Our students’ openness and devotion to other cultures in
Asia, and their active engagement in student and
academic life are truly remarkable. This past year, our
students were awarded prestigious fellowships such as
the Critical Language Scholarship, the Boren Scholarship,
and the Gilman International Scholarship, participated in
international and regional conferences such as the
Association for Asian Studies, and created the new
Undergraduate Asian Studies Student Association. One-
fourth of our students studied abroad in Asian countries.
With language skills and cultural competence, and study
abroad and internship experiences, they are highly
competitive in domestic and international job markets.
To better engage Asian students on campus, we
organized Asia Day for the first time, which we plan to
continue biannually.
Please read on for more details about our exciting year
and our dynamic faculty and students.
Wishing you a happy and restful summer,
EunHee Lee, Director
Asia Day
This year we organized UB’s
first Asia Day in
collaboration with the
Student Association of UB
on March 2, 2017. Thirty
five student organizations
and UB programs offered
activities, music, and
information to the UB
community. More than 500
UB students stopped by
Asia Day, where they
learned language skills,
played games and won
prizes, and listened to
musical traditions from
across Asia. Our own Asian
Studies students, faculty,
and student office
assistants taught Chinese
and Japanese paper folding, played janken, and shared snacks from Korea, China,
and Japan.
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2016-2017 Asia@Noon Lectures
This year’s Asia@Noon lecturers presented research
focusing on China, Japan, Korea, India, Singapore,
and Burma/Myanmar, with topics ranging from
modern political studies to historic international
negotiations. Undergraduates, graduate students,
faculty from many disciplines, and members of the
broader Buffalo community joined us for these well
attended talks and engaged the speakers in
discussion and debate. We hope to see many more
great Asia@Noon talks during 2017-2018. Watch our
website and Facebook page for announcements in
the coming months.
Kevin Cai, an affiliate of our
program and faculty in the
Renson University College at the
University of Waterloo,
presented “Territorial Disputes
in the South China Sea,”
providing an overview of the
current situation and the
background of the territorial disputes.
Janet Yang and Catherine Huang
from UB’s Department of
Communication presented
research supported in part by a
2015-2016 Asian Studies
Program Small Research Award.
Their “Air Pollution in China,
Findings from Two Studies” talk
included new results from a Qualtrics survey of
Chinese citizens’ air pollution information seeking
activities.
Michael Laver visited from the
Department of History at the
Rochester Institute of
Technology to present “Japan by
Proxy: Japan and the Americans
1797-1807.” His talk examined
journeys made to Japan by U.S.
frigates from 1803-1813.
Jang Wook Huh from UB’s
Department of English presented
new work supported in part by an
Asian Studies Program Small
Research Award. His “Friendship in
the Barracks: Black and Korean
Soldiers in U.S. Army Bases” talk
examined interactions between Black and Korean
soldiers in the 1940s that critiqued the imperialistic
presence of the U.S. Army in Korea.
Daniel Majchrowicz visited from
the Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures at
Northwestern University to
present “The Case of the
Vanishing Maharaja: Urdu Travel
Literature and Princely Politics in
South Asia.” His talk was
cosponsored by UB’s Honors College and Asian
Studies. He argued that the decision to write travel
accounts in Urdu reflected the princely states’ desire
to use travel literature to stabilize their legitimacy.
Jonathan Goldstein, from the
Department of History at the
University of West Georgia
presented “Singapore’s Baghdadi
Community from 1795 to 2017:
Setting a Standard for Jewish
Identity in East and Southeast
Asia.” He discussed the history of
the Baghdadi community and their international
trade connections. His talk was supported by the
Gnamm Fund and the Asian Studies Program.
Myo Thant, a policy consultant to
Burma who is based in Buffalo, NY
presented “Transition from
Military Rule to Representative
Democracy in Burma.” His talk
provided background history for
the transition and pointed out
areas of chaos and dysfunction in
the transition.
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Calling Asian Studies Alumni!
We’d like to hear from you—and profile you on our
website!
Did your Asian Studies major or minor lead you to Asia
-related work or travel in Asia? How are you using your
Asian language skills?
Send us updates, pictures, blog posts: we would like to
share your experiences and learn how we might help
our current majors and minors make connections and
use their new Asian Studies degrees! Email us at Asian-
Upcoming Fall 2017 Events We are lining up a great series of seminars and
speaker events for next fall! The Asian Studies
Program Annual Fall Symposium, scheduled for late
September, will focus on themes of religion in Asia.
UB faculty are invited to participate, please email
our Director, Dr. EunHee Lee ([email protected]), if
you are interested in presenting. Mark Nathan
submitted a proposal to the Association for Asian
Studies Northeast Asia Council Distinguished Speakers
Bureau to bring Dr. Louise Young from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison to UB in late October. Our
Asia@Noon talks will include presentations from our
Asian Studies Program Small Research Award
recipients, along with many others. All are welcome
to join us for these and our other events in the
coming year!
The Nila T. Gnamm Research Fund
2016-2017 Awardees Congratulations to the 2016-2017 recipients of the Nila T. Gnamm Research Award. The award is funded by an
endowment bequest from UB alumna Nila Gnamm to UB’s APEC Study Center to support faculty and graduate
student research focused on Southeast Asia.
Dr. JiYoung Park | UB Department of Urban &
Regional Planning. Research: “The Port of Singapore
and Panama Canal Expansion”
Dr. Mary Nell Trautner | UB Department of
Sociology. Research: “Unwanted Sexual Attention,
Masculinity, and Law”
Mr. Neal Johnson | UB School of Law. Research:
“Comparative Pharmacy Practice in Thailand and the
United States”
David McCaskey | UB Department of History.
Research: “A Cinematic Textbook: Constructions of a
National Past through Modern Film in Vietnam”
Gordon Tan | UB Department of Geography.
Conference travel: “Offshore Financial Flows: The
Dual Roles of Singapore”
Jihye Seong | UB Department of Linguistics.
Research: “Mail Order Brides from Vietnam and Their
Children in Korea”
Wanly Chen | UB Department of Communication.
Exchange program to Singapore
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Asian Studies Study Abroad Scholarships Spring and Summer 2017
Asian Studies undergraduates are studying abroad in
record numbers, many of them supported by our
Study Abroad Scholarship. This year our scholarship
competition included 20 applications for a total of
$3,200 in awards to support language-based study
abroad programs for UB students. Our scholarships
are supported by our program and through your
donations.
Congratulations to our four awardees:
Olayemi Akingboye. Ms. Akingboye is currently an
Asian Studies major and a Japanese language minor.
She plans to study abroad at International Christian
University in Tokyo, Japan. Olayemi said that she
“believes that this program will aid in expanding my
viewpoint of the world beyond what I already know
and provide me with an avenue to gain firsthand
experience in one of the regions that I am studying as
an Asian Studies major.” She plans a career with the
Japanese embassy in Nigeria, her home country, and
as a language professor.
Russell Guilbault. Mr. Guilbault is majoring in Asian
Studies and Philosophy and minoring in Chinese here
at UB. Russell says his study abroad program in China
will provide him with “immersion in the Chinese
language but also a solid foundation in reading and
interpreting major works of Chinese philosophy and
literature.” He plans for his study abroad experience
to instigate new research for him when he returns to
UB.
Kayleigh Hamernik. Ms. Hamernik is an
Environmental Studies major with a minor in Asian
Studies. Ms. Hamernik received the prestigious
Critical Language Scholarship and the Boren
Scholarship to study Hindi at the American Institute
of Indian Studies in Jaipur, India. She plans to
“become fluent in Hindi and to get as much cultural
exposure in India as possible” and will travel in India
to advance her studies of the culture of garbage and
waste.
Kayleigh Reed. Ms. Reed is currently an English
major and Asian Studies minor here at UB. She
studied abroad with University of Wisconsin-
Madison’s UW in India Program, CET Academic
Programs, Varanasi, India. Kayleigh said in her
application that “this opportunity to study abroad in
Varanasi is a privilege that I would have never
anticipated just a year ago. It is my hope that, in
Varanasi, I can continue where I left off in my Urdu
studies and increase my Hindi ability, as well as build
an anthropological, historical, and sociological
foundation for future study and career
opportunities.”
Watch our website and Facebook page for updates
from the field as they travel to India, China, and
Japan in the coming months!
2016 Study Abroad: China and Japan
The 2016 Asian Studies Study Abroad Scholarship awardees sent pictures from their studies in China and Japan:
Ryan Jones,
China
Lukas Dickash,
Japan
Rebecca Gasiorek,
China
image by
Connor Laurey, Japan
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Asian Studies Across UB, Cosponsored Events
We cosponsored eight events across campus and the
community this past year, contributing to the study of
critical questions in law, humanities, and the sciences, and
encouraging student interest in learning more about Asia.
We cosponsored and participated in tabling activities at
the fall and spring World Bazaar events, organized by UB’s
Intercultural and Diversity
Center. These events bring
hundreds of students to the
Student Union Lobby to
participate in activities, listen
to music, and learn about
world cultures. We
cosponsored three scholarly
conferences/symposia: the
“Buddhist Law and State Law
in Comparative Perspective
International Conference,” the
one-day “Global Governance
and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Symposium, ”
and with UB’s Department of Urban and Regional
Planning, “Recovering China’s Landscapes: A
Symposium.” We cosponsored two distinguished speaker
events at the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy,
Margaret Boittin’s (Osgoode Hall Law School) talk
“Enforcement and
Accommodation: Tier-based
Patterns in the Policing of
Prostitution in China” and
Mitra Sharafi’s (UW-Madison
Law School) “Corruption and
Forensic Experts in Colonial
India.” We worked with the
Buffalo Niagara World Trade
Center to promote student
participation in the fall China
Town Hall, “Local Connections,
National Reflections.”
Asian Studies Annual Faculty Symposium
Our Second Annual Asian Studies Fall
Faculty Symposium, “Language,
Discourse, and Culture in Asia,” was
held on September 15, 2016. Eight
speakers from six programs and
departments across the University at
Buffalo presented new research: Anya
Bernstein (Law), Matthew Dryer
(Linguistics), Walter Hakala (English),
Jang Wook Huh (English), EunHee Lee,
(Linguistics) Mitsuaki Shimojo
(Linguistics), Kristin Stapleton (History),
and Jianqiang Wang (Library and
Information Studies). The Asian Studies
Program fall symposia are deliberately
interdisciplinary and are intended to
catalyze cross-unit understanding and
collaboration. The 2016 Fall Faculty
Symposium was sponsored by the Asian
Studies Program and cosponsored by
the Department of Linguistics. Next
fall’s theme: religion. UB faculty are
welcome to join us as speakers or
participants!
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Undergraduate Student Scholarship
Our Asian Studies majors and minors are busy and
accomplished scholars: they present research at
conferences, successfully compete for scholarships and
awards, and perform original research. Our program
subsidizes their activities with small grants and awards. If
you’d like to support student research too, visit our Asian
Studies Fund page!
Here are a few student research highlights:
Russell Guilbault presented research on the Chinese
Islamic scholar Liu Zhi (ca. 1670-1724) at the
Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian
Studies, and will present new work on that topic at the
Asian Studies Conference Japan in July. Kayleigh
Hamernik was awarded the Critical Language
Scholarship and SAFLI Boren Scholarship, and attended
the AAS Annual Conference in Toronto. Kayleigh Reed
was awarded the Critical Language Scholarship and the
SAFLI Boren Scholarship, she also was awarded the CET
Scholarship for the Spring 2017 Univ. of Wisconsin
Program in Varanasi, India. Hanna Santanam was
awarded the Critical Language Scholarship and the SAFLI
Boren Scholarship. She presented original research at the
New York Conference on Asian Studies last fall and her
essay, “‘The Next King of Action:' The Visual Construction
of Indian Masculinity in Stardust” was accepted for
publication by Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South
Asian Popular Visual Culture. She joined her parents, Prof.
Walter Hakala, and other student scholars at UB’s
Student Academic Excellence Banquet (pictured below).
Eight students from UB presented papers at the
5th Pittsburgh Asia Consortium Undergraduate Research
Conference at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in April.
Chung Hwan Joe, one of our Asian Studies instructors,
attended the conference as a discussant. The research
UB students presented emerged from his popular fall
course “The Korean Wave”: Dai Ru Chew “The Korean
Wave Beauty Effect: The Change in Beauty Standards in
Asia,” Kainan Guo “Chinese Style Korean Variety TV: A
Different Approach of Business Model,” Yee Teng Chong
“K-pop Industry's Secret Formula to Success,” Tiffany Xu
“East Asian Celebrity Suicides: Not Personal But Cultural,”
Machi Suenaga “Good Effects of Japanese Pop Culture on
the Relationship between Korea and Japan,” Paige
Guinnane “The Creative Use of Violence in Korean Film:
In the Shadow of a Tragic History,” Jenny Simon “The
Legacy of Confucius in Modern Chinese Education,” and
Chun Gee Hong “Korean Cinema in the Global Market:
From Local Blockbuster to Extreme Cinema.” L to R: Lisa Gagnon, Hanna Santanam, Prof. Walt Hakala, Sushmita Gelda, Antara Majumd
Senior Capstone Projects
L to R: Carrie Bonds-Kendall, Prof. Nona Carter, Rebecca Gasiorek
Four graduating AS seniors presented their Capstone theses:
Carrie Bonds-Kendall (2016). Memoirs of a Geisha: The Book, the Movie and Real Life
Jonathan Chou (2017). Japanese Media's (mis) Representation of the Birth Rate Epidemic
Rebecca Gasiorek (2016). The Success of Japanese Boys' Love in America: A Mirror Image
Anthony Owczarzak (2017). Rise and Fall: How national morale influenced the creation of monolingual Japan
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The 2016-2017 Small Research Awards
Congratulations to our 2016-2017 Asian Studies Small
Research Award recipients! We received many fine
applications for student and faculty research. Thank
you to all who applied! We were able to award three
small grants:
Kiyono Fujinaga (Department of Linguistics): “L2
Japanese user’s pragmatic aspect of writings: exploring
World Japaneses”
Dr. Samina Raja (Department of Urban and Regional
Planning, School of Architecture and Planning): “Land
Use Changes Through the Lens of Haakh (Collards):
Planning Implications in a Conflict Region“
Jihye Seong (Department of Linguistics): “A
longitudinal study on L2 Korean phonological
development by ‘Mail–order brides’ from Southeast
Asia and their children in Korea”
Articles, Books, Lectures, and Awards: Asian Studies Faculty Highlights
Anya Bernstein has an article on Taiwan coming out
this spring: “Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and
Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy,” PoLAR:
Political and Legal Anthropology Review (forthcoming
2017). This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in
the Taipei city government, and in it Dr. Bernstein
argues that Taipei administrators mobilize the different
languages available in this plurilingual society to
produce new bureaucratic identities appropriate to
Taiwan's democratized state. Bernstein also was a
Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica's legal studies
institute, where she interviewed Supreme
Administrative Court justices, district court judges,
national and city government administrators, and others
about the evolution of Taiwan's administrative law for a
new research project on comparative administrative law
across different democracies.
Walter Hakala’s new book, Negotiating Languages:
Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia,
was published by Columbia University Press in August
2016 . The South Asian edition of Negotiating Languages
was published by Primus Books (New Delhi) in January
2017. Dr. Hakala delivered “Revisiting ‘How Newness
Enters the World’: The Semantic Strategies of Inclusion,
Identification, and Displacement in Hindvī
Vocabularies,” at the Fourth Perso-Indica Conference on
“Translation and the languages of Islam: Indo-
Persian tarjuma in a comparative perspective,” in Paris
last December. Hakala taught a survey of Asian
literature called "Global Culture" as part of the
Kyungpook National University Global Summer School in
Summer 2016. He was awarded the 2017 UB President
Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished
Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring and will be
promoted to the rank of Associate Professor effective
September 1, 2017. Hakala will be serving a three-year
term on the Selections Committee of the American
Institute of Indian Studies from 2017 to 2020.
Jang Wook Huh had two new publications this year,
“Beyond Afro-Orientalism: Langston Hughes, Koreans,
and the Poetics of Overlapping Dispossessions,” in
Comparative Literature 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 201-21
and “Josephine Baker Meets a Korean Housewife:
Narrative Cartoons, Women’s Labor, and the Circulation
of Modern Fetish” in Literature Compass 13, no. 5 (May
2016): 311-23. He presented “Sentimental Palimpsests
in the Pacific” at the Association for Asian American
Studies (AAAS) Annual Conference in Portland, OR,
“Comparative Notions of Unfreedom in the Pacific” at
the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual
(continued on page 10)
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Faculty Highlights (continued)
(continued from page 9)
Convention in Philadelphia last January, and “‘Color
Around the Globe’: Langston Hughes and Comparative
Racialization,” as a New Faculty Seminar at UB’s
Humanities Institute among many others. He received
two fellowships, a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the
Department of English, University of Oregon and the
Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship,
University at Buffalo, but he has decided to take a new
faculty position at the University of Washington in fall
2017.
Yan Liu is revising an article manuscript on healing by
incantation in medieval China, in which he investigates
the rationale of this peculiar healing through the lens
of etiology and explores the dynamic interplay
between medicine and religion (Daoism and
Buddhism) in China. Last November he gave a talk in
the T'ang Studies Society Conference in Sarasota,
focusing on the history of saffron in Tang China. The
talk presented research from his project on foreign
aromatics and the history of scent in medieval China.
Dr. Liu organized a panel in the Association for Asian
Studies Annual Conference in Toronto entitled "Poison
or Panacea? Toxic Substances in East Asian Medicine
from the Tang Dynasty to the Present." His talk in the
panel focused on a popular and toxic drug called Five-
Stone Powder in medieval China.
EunHee Lee published two journal articles: “Case
alternation in temporal adverbials in Korean,” Lingua
189-190:1-18 and “Long distance anaphora caki in
Korean,” Linguistic Analysis 41 (in press). Her book,
Korean Syntax and Semantics, was contracted by
Cambridge University Press. Dr. Lee presented “Case
stacking in Korean” at the 24th Japanese/Korean
Linguistics Conference in Tokyo, Japan.
Nadine Murshid received the 2016-17 Excellence in
Research Award from the Buffalo Center for Social
Research, UB School of Social Work. She was the
Keynote Speaker at the International Conference on
Envisioning Our Common Future, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Dr. Murshid’s publications this past year include
“Bullying victimization and mental health outcomes of
adolescents in Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,”
Children and Youth Services Review, Advance online
publication, doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.03.003 and
with F.M. Critelli, “Empowerment and intimate partner
violence in Pakistan: Results from a nationally
representative survey,” Journal of Interpersonal
Violence, online publication, doi: 0886260517690873.
Kristin Stapleton has begun service as Director of
Graduate Studies for UB’s Department of History and is
involved in an initiative spearheaded by the American
Historical Association to promote diversified careers for
holders of advanced degrees in humanities fields. She
has taken part in several online bookclub discussions of
her new volume Fact and Fiction: 1920s China and Ba
Jin’s Family (Stanford, 2016) and the novel it concerns.
Dr. Stapleton was interviewed about Fact and Fiction
for the New Books in East Asian Studies podcast (link)
and discussed it as the keynote speaker at the
5th Pittsburgh Asia Consortium Undergraduate
Research Conference at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania. She published an essay on comparative
global cities in the Journal of Modern Chinese History in
fall 2016, and continues to work on her research on the
1950s transformation of Chinese cities under the
influence of the Soviet model. She also continues to
serve as the chief editor of the scholarly journal
Twentieth-Century China, published by Johns Hopkins
University Press. She will be promoted to full professor
as of September 1, 2017.
Cynthia Wu published “Distanced from Dirt:
Transnational Vietnam in the U.S. South" in the latest
issue of south: a scholarly journal.
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Asian Studies Program Directory 2016-2017
Director | EunHee Lee | [email protected]
Assistant to the Director | Caroline Funk | [email protected]
Director of Undergraduate Studies | Nona Carter | [email protected]
Asian Studies Advisory Council Chair | Jeannette Ludwig (2016) | Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen (2017)
Asian Studies Executive Committee 2016-2017
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen (2017) | Anya Bernstein Nona Carter, ex officio | Walter Hakala Jeannette Ludwig (2016) | Mark Nathan | Mitsuaki Shimojo
Korea. Photo by C. Legg ’15.
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ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAM 412 Clemens Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
716-645-3474
asianstudies.buffalo.edu
WH
O W
E A
RE
The Asian Studies Program at
the University of Buffalo is
built on the strengths of our
Asia-focused Advisory
Council faculty members and
the diverse Asia-related
research interests of faculty
members throughout the
University. The Asian Studies
Program offers a major and a
minor in Asian Studies, and
joint and double-major
programs can be designed to
fit the interests of students.
Asian Studies hosts and
cosponsors workshops,
lectures, artistic presentations,
and brown-bag lunch
seminars. We strive to build
and maintain a dynamic
community of students and
scholars energized by the
study of Asia and to provide
rich cultural and educational
opportunities.