Newsletter 2009/ 2010

NEWSLETTER EAST ASIAN DEPARTMENT STUDIES & PROGRAM 2009/ 2010 DIRECTOR’S LETTER Dear Friends and Colleagues, Unfortunately, we begin this new academic year with some austerity plans in place. As many of you know, last winter an economic crisis--totally of man-made proportions--hit the University and forced us all to realize that “bad times” were in store for our continuing programs and future academic plans. We are hopeful that “good times” are in the offing longer-term, but the rhetoric of “happy days will be here again” is still hard to take seriously. That said, however, we are fortunate that the last several months have seen an improvement in the University’s investments, and thus the dire March prognostications for the next ten years at Princeton have turned out to be overblown. Overblown, perhaps, but no one is ready to breathe easily. The same economic planning mavens who got us into spending beyond our means are also in charge of inventing a “new normal” by which Nassau Hall now calls the shots centrally and tells us what we can spend and what we can’t. When David Howell, Chair of the EAS Department, and I met with President Tilghman last spring, we were reassured when she told us that in the end the future of the East Asian Studies Department and Program at Princeton should be in the hands of our faculty and not our administrators. We hope that day will return soon enough. We shouldn’t dwell on the dark side of all this. The bright side is that the EAS Department and Program have together contributed mightily in helping the University overcome its large financial shortfall after the “crash” last year. At the same time however, by working closely with the Provost’s Office, we have been able to preserve our core EAS programs and financial commitments to undergraduate and graduate education, foreign language teaching, supporting acquisitions and positions in the East Asian Library, and providing faculty research support. We will need to cut back on our ambitious outside speakers’ program, look more carefully at all requests for EAS Program support, and eliminate our fall and winter lunar New Year receptions for a while. Our Program Committee will also begin to review our ongoing programs this fall to see whether there are other ways to improve our academic mission at the University. Should any of you have ideas or suggestions, we would welcome them. Despite these dark clouds, building a positive atmosphere for our ongoing and new graduate students will remain a priority for both EAS and the Graduate School. There will be no cuts in graduate stipends or summer support, and we will continue to be able to support all worthy requests for final-year Dissertation ritingW Fel- lowships and DCE tuition waivers. We will continue to work with PIIRS to maximize our resources for graduate student research in the EAS aspects of the Humanities and Social Sciences. We welcome our new EAS graduate students (see the information about them inside the newsletter) in their respective Departments and hope they will stop by the EAS Program Office in 219 Frist to say hello. eW also welcome all ongoing and new undergraduates to stop by and learn more about the language and course requirements for our EAS Certifi- cates for students majoring in outside Departments such as Politics, Economics, Sociology, or at the Woodrow Wilson School. We can also continue to provide seniors with research support for their Senior Thesis or Project as long as a significant component deals with East Asian issues. We look forward to a challenging year, and we expect that our activities within EAS and those of the WWS’s “China and the World Program” under Tom Christensen will continue to have a considerable impact campus- wide. We are especially excited by the prospect of welcoming Professors Dieter Kuhn (see inside) and Ge Zhaoguang to Princeton next spring. Professor Ge will come as one of the first “Princeton Global Scholars” sponsored by the Council on International Teaching and Research. Professor Ge is the Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. He specializes in medieval Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhism and Daoism, and he also commands attention for his comparative studies of pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea. He will be in residence in the East Asian Studies Department beginning in spring 2010 and will come to Princeton for at least six weeks annually over the next three years. His pres- ence will also enhance our increased faculty and graduate student contacts with their counterparts at Fudan. I myself have spent the last two summers in Shanghai helping to promote a long-term relationship between Princeton and Fudan that will benefit both sides at all levels of interaction. Finally, I want to welcome back our distinguished faculty in East Asian Studies, especially those who were on sabbatical leave last year, including but not only Janet Chen, Atsuko Ueda, Joy Kim, Willard Peterson, among others. Several EAS graduate students spent time last year in China, Korea, and Japan and will return to Princeton this year. We also wish Megan Santosusso well in her new position as she moves on from Princeton. As our Program Coordinator, she contributed greatly to all aspects of the Program office’s work, including pre- paring the annual newsletter that you are now reading. We will all miss her. We are pleased to welcome Beate Witzer as the new Program Coordinator. She brings her experience at PIIRS and the Humanities Council to our EAP office. With best wishes, Ben Elman, Director of EAP and Professor of East Asian Studies and History DEPARTMENT NEWS Faculty News Congratulations to Amy Borovoy who has been promoted to associate professor as of July 2009. Amy joined the East Asian Studies Depart- ment in the spring of 1999 as a lecturer and was later promoted to assistant professor in the Fall of 2000. Congratulations also to Christina L. Davis who was promoted to Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs effective this year. She is an associated professor in the East Asian Studies Department focusing on comparative and Japanese politics. Both Amy and Christina have accepted invitations to join the Program Committee for East Asian Studies. Department Chair and Professor of East Asian Studies and History, David Howell, has been named Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies. New Faculty Everett Zhang (on leave Fall 2009): I received my Ph.D. in cultural anthro- pology at UC Berkeley and did two years of post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School. I worked as an executive editor of an academic journal and a researcher in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences before I came to the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D. As I grew up in Maoist China and experienced the first years of post-Mao reform, my academic studies have always brought into focus the concerns about where contemporary China is heading. My book manuscript, entitled “Impotence in China: An Illness of Chinese Modernity” examines the changes from Maoist socialism to post-Mao Chinese society, seen through the changes in the body, sexuality and medicine. My current project examines another important change over the past three decades of reform—the change in grieving, trauma and the governance of life. If my previous project is about “the body,” my current project deals with “life.” Because the complexities of the change in post-Mao and post-Deng China have frus- trated many established theories about how a society changes, we are facing the challenge of understanding the changing Chinese society. I try to base conceptualization of “contemporary China” on how the body is used and how life is governed. While coming from its recent past— Maoist China, “contemporary China” in its thirty years of reform is quickly becoming history. It is fitting to say that, compelled by the present urge to examine the past, studies of contemporary China are a history of the present. Visiting Faculty Dieter Kuhn (Teaching Spring 2010) is joining the East Asian Department as Visiting Professor. He is a full professor of sinology and holds the chair of sinology at Würzburg University (Germany). Before taking up his sinological studies, he was trained as textile merchant and graduated in textile business management. At the uni- versities of Cologne and Bonn he studied sinology as his major, East Asian and European art history, japanology and Manchu studies as minors. He received his Dr. phil. in 1977 at the University of Cologne with a dissertation on the Ziren yizhi, the earliest treatise on loom building from 1264. Afterwards he was invited by Joseph Need- ham to join him in his East Asian History of Science Library (now Needham Research Institute) at Cambridge for several years, before he continued his career at the University of Heidelberg. In 1985 he was habilitated in sinology at the Free University Berlin. Aside from his various teaching and research positions before being appointed full professor in 1988, he was a Heisenberg research fellow, a research fellow of the Max Planck Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Academia Sinica, Peking. Aside from his interest in 20th century Chinese history of Republican China, his research focuses on the history of ma- terial culture, technology, art and archaeology in medieval China, especially of the Song (960-1279) and the Tang (6018-907) periods. His research during the past decades are articles in journals and exhibition catalogues and reviews well mirrored in 26 monographs and books edited.

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