Faculty
Congratulations to Xiaorong Wang who recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee! If you'd like to learn more about her dissertation, "Learners' Experiences of Written Complexities Development through Discussion Board Activities in Chinese as a Foreign Language Class," please take a look at the abstract.
Ed Shaughnessy, Larraine J. and Herrlee Creel Distinguished Service Professor in Early Chinese Studies, was interviewed for the Shanghai Review of Books. The article can be found here. Shaughnessy was also interviewed in “We Understand Only a Very Small Part of Ancient China,” Wenhui bao, 15 November 2019.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and EALC, received an honorary degree from Harvard May 30, 2019. Click here for more information.
Michael Bourdaghs, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in EALC, has been awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on his new book project, “From Postwar to Cold War: Japanese Culture in the Age of Three Worlds.” Previous scholarship on Cold War Japan has focused largely on the U.S.-Japan relationship, but this new book argues that a full understanding of cultural production from the period requires us to also look at how Japanese artists and thinkers actively participated in the Socialist bloc and in the so-called Third World of the nonaligned Bandung Movement. The book had its origins in a course Bourdaghs regularly teaches in EALC, “Japanese Cultures of the Cold War: Literature, Film, Music.” With this year’s award, Bourdaghs joins a long list of EALC faculty who been named Guggenheim Fellows, including Norma Field (1988), Donald Harper (2008), Tetsuo Najita (1981), Haun Saussy (2014), Anthony Yu (1976), and Judith Zeitlin (2011).
Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College, is one of this year's recipients of the prestigious Dan David Prize. The Dan David Foundation of Tel Aviv University awards three $1 million prizes, which "recognize and encourage innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms." For more information go here.
In June 2019, Paola Iovene and Professor Zhang Huiyu from Peking University organized the workshop "Cultures of Labor, Inequality, and Eviction: Migrant Workers' Literature and Media Practices in Contemporary China" at the UChicago Center in Beijing.
University of Chicago historian and professor Judith Zeitlin, and Beijing based composer Yao Chen collaboratively undertake the creation of an opera, with Yao composing the music, and Zeitlin writing the libretto. Entitled Ghost Village, the opera will be based on a ghost story of the same name that features in Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) masterpiece, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.
Graduate Students
Yiren Zheng recently published her article, "Listening askance with a seventeenth-century Chinese acousmatic voice," in a special issue of Ecological Soundings, in Parallax.
In June 2020 David Hogue was invited by Professor Byung-Joon Kim 金秉駿 (김병준) to give the talk at an advisor group study meeting at Seoul National University History Department. David discussed the material features and content of the excavated Wang Ji 妄稽 ("The Wild Schemer") manuscript of the Beijing daxue xi Han zhu shu 北京大学藏西汉竹书 ("West Han Bamboo Books Housed at Beijing University"). He was also awarded the 2020 Karen DiNal Memorial Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Academic Writing to First-Year Students in the College for his performance as a Writing Intern in the Humanities Core during the Autumn 2019 and Winter 2020 quarters. Staff of the Writing Program noted that his students "enthusiastically report that [his] leadership, kindness, and expert feedback made them stronger writers in the time they spent with [him]."
Jiayi Chen Submitted "The Ghostly Dicing: Gambling and Deception in Ming-Qing Short Stories" to an edited book titled Games and Play in China from the Premodern to the Contemporary (edited by Douglas Eyman, Li Guo, and Hongmei Sun).
Li Qi received the Helen-Rich Travel Grant ($2,335) for excavation in Zincirli, Turkey during Summer 2018 from the Oriental Institute, as well as an offer for 2019 Chinese Object Study Workshop held at Royal Ontario Museum from August 19-23, 2019.
Alexander Murphy received a 3-month funding extension from Fulbright-IIE Graduate Research Fellowship for continued research at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan (Sep - Dec 2019). Murphy also had a conference paper entitled "Voices Newly Heard: Poetry, Sound Recording, and the Acoustic Imagination in Interwar Japan" accepted as part of a co-organized panel entitled 'Emergent Means: Media, Performance, and Actuality in Interwar Japan' for the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Boston, MA, March 19-22, 2020 (cancelled due to COVID-19). His completed English translation of Yoshimasu Gozo's film entitled "Urakami Gyokudo: His Spirit's Hand... Blood Drops," part of GozoCinefilm project, will be released through Osiris Publishing (Tokyo, Japan) and the Urakami Gyokudo Foundation.
Yiying Pan receive a one-year "Global Perspectives on Society" Teaching Fellowship at NYU-Shanghai to be started September 2020.
Kyle Peters had various works published this year, including “From Sound to Rhythm: Theories of Self-Formation in Modern Japanese Philosophy,” (Philosophy Department Colloquium, Lake Forest College. February 2020), "The Kyoto and Tokyo Schools in the Sphere of Print: Moving Beyond Academia through the ‘Culture of the Printing Press” (International Association for Japanese Philosophy, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. October 2019.), and "「初期の西田哲学とオートポイエシス－自己形成の二つ形態」[Early Nishida Philosophy and Autopoiesis: On TwoFrameworks of Self Formation]" (East Asian Academy (EAA) Forum,University ofTokyo. August 2019.)
Yuanxie Shi had "A China Carved and Collected: Ningbo Whitewood Figurines in the Long Twentieth Century" published in the Journal of Chinese History, and it can be found here. Shi had works accepted by three conferences this year, as well: AAS in Asia (Kobe 2020); Textiles in Motion & Transit (Leiden, October2020); EACS (Leipzig, August 2020).
Aliz Horvath runs "Humanista: The Podcast" on the role and significance of the humanities in the 21st century. Listen now!
Internal Awards:
David Hogue was awarded the UChicago GRAD Office GRAD Global Initiative (GGI) "Pitch" Internship Grant for $4,000 to support expenses for his self-designed internship at the Wuhan University Center for Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts. During the period of internship (Jun - Sep 2019), Hogue provided translation services, and the internship culminated in completion of an English translation of a long article by the Center Director , which was published in Bamboo and Silk (Volume 3, Issue 2) in April 2020.
Alexander Murphy served as co-coordinator for the UChicago CAS Workshop "Sound and Society" in the 2019-2020 academic year.
Presentations:
Yin Cai participated in a roundtable panel presentation at the 10th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 10) in Chiang Mai Thainland, in the "Making and Knowing" sub-section.
Alexander Murphy presented a 60-minute lecture entitled "Overheard in Passing: Rumor, Radio, and Colonial Estrangement in Interwar Japan" for the November meeting of the Kyoto Asian Studies Group (KASG) at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan in November 2019.
Sabine Schulz gave a presentation titled “Periods of Spring and Winter: Japanese Idols as a Cold War Creation and Artifact” at the 26th Annual Japan Studies Association Conference as part of the Japan Since 1945 panel. Schulz was supposed to present “Sixteen Forever: Virtual Idol Hatsune Miku and the Conflicting Desires of Fans” at PopCon, the conference of the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle this spring as a part of the panel Sounding Youthful in 20th and 21st Century Japan”; due to COVID-19, the conference has been postponed until September and will now take place virtually.
Howard Sum Cheuk Shing was scheduled to present at AAS 2020 and the 19th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS)in August 2020. He was also accepted and received funding to attend a doctoral school specialist course, “Buddhism and Medicine in East Asia” (Ghent University), in June 2020. While AAS 2020 has been cancelled, the other two events have been postponed until 2021.
Undergrads, Alumni, and More
Recent EALC College graduate Samuel Baureis has been accepted into the highly competitive 2019-2020 Yenching Scholars program at Peking University: "While at the Yenching Academy at Peking University, I plan to continue my study of the philosophical significance of relationships in the Confucian context, specifically friendship, and the consequences such relationships have on ethical and political structures within a comparative philosophical framework. I have chosen to focus on friendship in particular because, out of the five primary relationships in Confucian philosophy, it has received the least attention in contemporary scholarly work. I believe that a philosophical look at the importance of friendship provides a productive jumping-off point for a larger comparative dialogue between Western and Confucian philosophies. In engaging in this topic, I hope to expand the sphere of cross-cultural knowledge held between Eastern and Western countries and enable effective and meaningful dialogue on pressing political and international issues."
First-year College student Lucy Li won Second Place in the 2019 Midwest University Speech Contest.
Alumnus George Sipos will start an exciting new job in March 2019. Read the full article to learn more! click link
