The EALCS 2017 Newsletter is now available to download. We hope you enjoy!
Recent News
EALCS Ph.D. candidate Carl Gabrielson awarded Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Dissertation Fellowship for 2018-2019
Carl at his prospectus defense with his committee
EALCS Ph.D. candidate Carl Gabrielson has been awarded a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Dissertation Fellowship for 2018-2019. Carl will spend one year in Japan conducting ethnographic research on and around U.S. military bases. His research focuses on interpersonal relations between Japanese people and the Americans from the bases, as well as the overlapping spaces of the bases and their surrounding communities. He argues that these relationships and spaces create channels for both intentional and unintentional forms of militarization and surveillance to affect the everyday lives of both groups. Carl will be based out of Meio University in Nago, Okinawa, where we will be hosted by University President Yamazato Katsunori.
Talk: Reshaping the Present by Reconnecting with the Past from an Urban Ainu Perspective
The Reinventing Japan RFG is co-sponsoring a talk with the East Asian
Center and the American Indian and Indigenous Collective!
When: 5:00 p.m, May 21
Where: SSMS 2135
“Sōseki” Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist by Professor John Nathan
Prof. John Nathan published his new book, “Sōseki” Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist from Columbia University Press.
In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.
Full article available here:
Columbia University Press
Stanford University Press Publishes “The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China” by Professor Xiaowei Zheng
Professor Xiaowei Zheng has just published her monograph The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China with Stanford University Press. China’s 1911 Revolution was a momentous political transformation. Its leaders, however, were not rebellious troublemakers on the periphery of imperial order. On the contrary, they were a powerful political and economic elite deeply entrenched in local society and well-respected both for their imperially sanctioned cultural credentials and for their mastery of new ideas. The revolution they spearheaded produced a new, democratic political culture that enshrined national sovereignty, constitutionalism, and the rights of the people as indisputable principles. Based upon previously untapped Qing and Republican sources, The Politics of Rights is a nuanced and colorful chronicle of the revolution as it occurred in local and regional areas. Zheng explores the ideas that motivated the revolution, the popularization of those ideas, and their animating impact on the Chinese people at large. The focus of the book is on the transformative effect that revolution has on people and what they learn from it. For more information, please see her blog post China’s Political Paradox.
EALCS PhD students win Kathryn Davis Fellowships for Peace and scholarships for summer language study
Every summer since 2007, Fellows for Peace has brought 100 aspiring and experienced peacemakers to the Middlebury Language Schools and the Monterey Institute, where they build skills in foreign language or policy studies.
This summer, EALCS announces that THREE of our own – Keita Moore, Kai Wasson, and Winni Ni –will be Kathryn Davis Fellows. Keita and Kai will study Korean at Middlebury at Mills, and Winni will study Japanese at Middlebury in Vermont. She will be joined by Kaitlyn Ugoretz who won a Middlebury scholarship to study Japanese.
Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace
The Language Schools at Middlebury College in Vermont and in California, at Middlebury at Mills, are recognized around the world as premier sites of language study. An environment of complete immersion produces cultural fluency in addition to linguistic competence, and participants are encouraged to live the language they are learning. Davis Fellowships for Peace are available in all of the Language Schools: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
