2011-12 Annual Report
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East Asian Studies Program and Department Annual Report 2011-12 Director’s Letter August 2012 The mission of the East Asian Studies Program is to support teaching and research about China, Korea, and Japan throughout the university. We administer a certificate program formalizing the study of East Asia for majors in any department in the university. We fund undergraduates studying languages during the summer. We assist graduate students when they take courses abroad, conduct research, and write their dissertations. We support the East Asian Library in the acquisition and cataloguing of books. We sponsor a weekly lecture series and numerous conferences, workshops, and performances. We provide funding for many faculty positions, and we underwrite recent renovations to Frist and Jones Hall. Our goal is to ensure that Princeton maintains a vibrant environment for students and teachers engaged in Asian studies. Student learning and research was extensive during the 2011-12 academic year. 19 undergraduates completed certificates in the Program in East Asian Studies. They earned a Program certificate by studying at least four semesters of an East Asian language through the intermediate level, taking at least four additional courses in one of the disciplines focusing on East Asia (politics, anthropology, art and archaeology, history, religion, etc.), and completing a significant piece of independent work on an East Asian subject. Certificate students tended to major in the social sciences (6 in WWS and 5 in Economics), with additional represen- tation from other divisions of the university, including 1 in Chemical Engineering and 1 in Psychology. The 19 Program certificate students joined 9 majors and 13 certificate students in the Department of East Asian Studies, altogether constituting 41 students majoring or concentrating in this area, demonstrating strong, continuing interest in East Asian Studies broadly speaking. We are extremely proud of all these students. The time they spent, and how and where they spent it—most devoting at least one sum- mer to study abroad—insure that a certificate will mean more than simply being a mark of distinction on their resumes. Many of them plan the next few years or a career working or studying in an East Asian field. Research by Ph.D. students in the ten departments in the humanities and social sciences supported by the Program in East Asian Studies was even more extensive than in prior years. Partnering with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Stud- ies (PIIRS), we supported 48 graduate students in their research. Projects ranged from sociological research in the Philippines and Cambodia to consulting archives throughout China and Japan, studying pottery-making in Korea, and pursuing advanced language training abroad. The two summer language programs supported by the Program in East Asian Studies and directed by our faculty are stronger than ever. Princeton-in-Beijing (PiB) enrolled about 60 Princeton students out of 160 total students for the summer 2012 session. PiB remains the best and most competitive intensive summer program for Chinese language. In Japan, having weathered the disasters of 2011, Princeton-in-Ishikawa (PiI) returned to its full strength. Featuring a year of Japanese training in an intensive 8 weeks for the best students in the U.S., PiI is enrolling about 50 undergraduate and graduate students, with Princeton students accounting for 1/3 of the total. Princeton’s Dean of the Faculty, David Dobkin, graciously agreed to represent Princeton at the celebration of PiI’s 20th year this summer, an important signal to our partner, the Ishikawa Foundation for International Exchange (IFIE), an affiliate of the local government, of Princeton’s enthusiasm for the program. Lectures, conferences, workshops, and visiting appointments were a significant part of EAS Program-sponsored activities in 2011-12. As part of our regular lecture series we hosted more than 24 lectures, on subjects ranging from omens and morality in ancient China, to Japanese media representations of the 311 disaster, to monastic education in early modern Tibet. Together with the Council on International Teaching and Research (CITR) and other units of the university we hosted two public lectures by Global Scholars. The first was by Jisi Wang, Dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies. The second, concerning relations between the Qing Dynasty Manchu court and Vietnamese envoys in the eighteenth century, was delivered in Chinese to an audience of more than 60 by Zhaoguang Ge, Director of the In- stitute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities at Fudan University. With the support of the Stewart Fellowship in Humanities, we also supported the teaching of a graduate seminar on East Asian Buddhism by one of Japan’s leading Buddhologists, Toru Funayama (Kyoto Univer- sity). We also co-sponsored two very successful graduate-run programs. One was a two-day workshop conducted in Japanese on “Japan’s Oldest Archive,” attended by over 45 scholars and graduate students from the U.S. and Europe, and led by the world’s leading specialist on the subject, Towao Sakaehara (Osaka City University). The second was a monthly colloquium on contemporary China that brought together graduate students and faculty, largely from the social sciences, to discuss work in progress. As part of our commitment to our primary scholarly association in the U.S., the Program hosted the 40th annual meet- 2 East Asian Studies Annual Report Department and Program News ing of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies in October, 2011. The first day of the conference, “Teaching about Asia Workshop,” was attended by over 90 area high school teachers. The second two days, drawing more than 270 participants to 40 panels, concluded with a ceremony naming Martin Collcutt, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, the Distinguished Asianist of 2011. A change in format for this publication will be evident to some readers. In the past we issued a single newsletter at the beginning of each academic year. We decided, however, that beginning in 2012 we would divide the functions of the traditional publication into two pieces. The first is this Annual Report, summarizing the academic year just completed. This year published in late August, we hope to publish future Annual Reports around the time of Reunions in early June. The second publication will conform more closely to the function of a newsletter, announcing news at the beginning of the academic year and introducing those who are new to the Princeton community. Stephen F. Teiser D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion Director, Program in East Asian Studies Department and Program News Faculty in the EAS Department Hideki Richard Okada, professor of East Asian studies who was known for his work spanning classi- cal as well as contemporary Japanese literature, died on April 4, 2012, after a long illness. He joined the faculty in 1985 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1983. While Okada was an expert on the eleventh-century classic “The Tale of Genji,” he also studied contemporary Japanese culture, including animation, live-action film, hip-hop music, and television dramas. In his undergraduate course on “East Asian Humanities,” Okada enhanced students’ understanding of the East Asian tradition in a manner that highlighted its similarities to and contrasts with Western culture. At the graduate level, Okada taught courses on classical narrative, classical poetics, medieval discourse and culture, censorship of Japanese literature in the 1960s, and modern writers. The Department and Program of East Asian studies held a memorial service on April 21, 2012 in 202 Jones Hall where faculty, staff, family, and friends gathered to pay tribute to his life and scholarly career in all its richness and depth. Seiichi Makino, professor of Japanese and linguistics, began his career at Princeton University in 1991 and retired from the Department of East Asian Studies at the end of June 2012. Makino is a prolific author in the broad field of Japanese language and linguistics and has published many books and articles in English and Japanese. His many contributions to the field of Japanese language teaching have been widely recog- nized throughout his long teaching career. Over the years, Makino received numerous awards and distinctions. In 2007, his contributions to Japanese language instruction were honored by the Society of Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, and for his 70th birthday his colleagues in the profession contributed to a festschrift, An Invitation to Second Language Acquisition Research in Japanese: In Honor of Seiichi Makino, ed. Yukiko Hatasa (Tokyo, 2003). We offer our congratulations to him on 20 years of out- standing leadership in developing and directing the Japanese language program at Princeton. A May 2012 conference organized in his honor, “New Horizons in Japanese Language Education,” is described below under “Events.” Image: With Department Chair Ben Elman at his retirement party. Other information about activities of Princeton faculty is provided below, in the section on Faculty News. Department and Program News 3 Department and Program News Visiting Faculty and Fellows Professor Toru Funayama, Professor of Buddhist Studies at Kyoto University, Institute for Research in the Humanities, was a long-term visiting fellow (Princeton’s Council of the Humanities), holding the Stewart Fellowship in the fall semester. He taught a seminar on The Sutra of Brahma’s Net in East Asian Buddhism and worked with faculty and graduate students in East Asian Stud- ies and Religion. Funayama has been described as a Buddhological renaissance man because of the breadth of his knowledge about Buddhism in India, Tibet, China and Japan. He has published seven books and more than 50 articles or book chapters dealing with Indian philosophy, the linguistic features of texts translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, Chinese biographies of Buddhist monks, lay Buddhist practice in China, and Chinese philosophy in the fifth and sixth centuries.