Mao Chen – Working at a Liberal Arts College

Mao Chen holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is Professor of Chinese Literature and language, and the Courtney & Steven Ross Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College. Her academic interests include Chinese literary culture of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, women’s writing, hermeneutics and reception theory, translation studies, film and performative criticism. She has served as President of New York Association for Asian Studies (NYCAS), an elected member of COC on the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and Director of Asian Studies Program at Skidmore College. Twice a recipient of the Outstanding Service Award, she also served as a Director on the Executive Board of NYCAS till 2022.

Christopher Rea – Overcoming the Mid-Career Slump: Balancing Service, Teaching, and the Second Book Project

Christopher Rea will talk with mentor session participants about how to deal with the challenges of balancing various interests and obligations as they move deeper into their careers. Rea has mentored many graduate students and colleagues on publishing matters over the past 15 years. His co-authored book, Where Research Begins (2022), is a mentoring and self-mentoring guide for researchers developing a project that matters to themselves, as well as to the outside world (including acquisitions editors, grant selection committees, and hiring committees).

Nianshen Song – Considering, Starting, or Building an Academic Career in China

Nianshen Song’s mentor session will discuss the logistics of building one’s academic career in mainland China. After graduating in 2013 from University of Chicago, Song first worked as a Mellon Postdoc at Vassar College, then became an assistant professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. After getting tenure at UMBC in 2020, Song moved to Beijing to join Tsinghua University as a full professor in 2021. He is currently working as associate director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Uma Ganesan – Teaching-focused Careers in Asian Studies at Small Liberal Arts Colleges: The Joys and Challenges of Teaching Beyond Your Specialization

Uma Ganesan has extensive experience in teaching beyond her immediate areas of specialization and will share lessons from her own career with mentor session participants. Ganesan has 12 years of teaching and serving at small liberal arts colleges, the first three in visiting positions and the remaining nine as tenure-track and tenured faculty. During this time, she has taught courses broadly in Asian (South, Southeast, and East) and world history (survey courses and thematic courses)—an experience that she describes as “challenging, [but] it has also been immensely rewarding.”

Joseph Ho – Publishing Your First Monograph

Joseph Ho published his first monograph with Cornell University Press in 2022 and is a recently-tenured associate professor at a small liberal arts college. Ho will share lessons from the publishing process with participants in this mentor session, offering advice on approaching the publication of one’s first monograph.

June Hee Kwon – Getting Your Academic Career Started: Preparing for Life after Graduate School

June Hee Kwon is interested in mentoring graduate students or early career scholars regarding job preparation, teaching/researching balance, motivating students to study Asian Studies, and moving to the second book/research project. Kwon received her PhD from Duke University and teaches cultural anthropology at California State University Sacramento. Her first book, Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers, was published in November 2023, and she is currently working on a second book project, Tangerine Island: The Social History of Fruit Trees in Jeju Korea.

Merlyna Lim – Navigating the Job Market and Employment in the US, Canada, and Europe as an Immigrant

Merlyna Lim has had experience navigating the job market, employment, scholarly/professional life/challenges, as well as just life-of-an-immigrant in general, in three countries. First, in the Netherlands as a grad student who secured a postdoc in the US before receiving her PhD. Second, Lim started her early career in the United States (postdoc, then a tenure-track position) prior to moving as a mid-career scholar to Canada (a Canada Research Chair).

Sarah Grant – Asian Studies at the Teaching University

At California State University, Fullerton, Sarah Grant serves as a mentor in several capacities: mentoring a group of underrepresented and marginalized first-generation undergraduate students; mentoring MA students in an interdisciplinary faculty-graduate student mentor program; and mentoring junior/new faculty through an established “Mentor Connext” program around issues of service, teaching load, and cost of living in California. Grant is passionate about established mentor spaces in the university and an advocate for further support around mentorship in professional associations. Her interests are largely in making sure that all folks are represented in the AAS by making the teaching university visible and sharing experiences about thriving while teaching and doing service, rather than being service- or teaching-averse. She was able to formalize this dialogue with the assistance of the AAS Striving for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Asian Studies: Humanities Grants for Asian Studies Scholars program in Fall 2023 through a “Teaching Southeast Asia at the Teaching University” symposium that brought regional public university teacher-scholars, community college teacher-scholars, and graduate students together to talk about establishing meaningful Southeast Asian Studies programming at universities without access to resources.

Antje Richter – Publishing in Asian Studies

Antje Richter is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Chinese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has also been an editor for East Asia at the Journal of the American Oriental Society for a decade. Repeating her popular mentoring session from 2023, Richter will offer advice and respond to questions about publishing in Asian Studies journals.

Jonathan Abel – Overcoming the Mid-Career Slump: Balancing Service, Teaching, and the Second Book Project

Having recently come through his own mid-career slump, Jonathan Abel seeks to share his thoughts on that period with participants in this mentorship session. An Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese Studies at Penn State University, Abel has also been a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, translated and edited several volumes, and in 2023 published his second monograph, The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (University of Minnesota Press).

Morgan Pitelka – Publishing in Asian Studies

Morgan Pitelka serves as Coeditor of the Journal of Japanese Studies and will speak with mentorship session participants about the ins and outs of scholarly publishing. In addition to his work with JJS, Pitelka has published seven books in Asian Studies and served as Director of the Carolina Asia Center, Chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair of the American Advisory Committee to the Japan Foundation.

Nichan Singhaputargun – Collaborative Research in Southeast Asian Studies

Nichan Singhaputargun is a lecturer at the Department of International Development, School of Social Innovation, Mae Fah Luang University, Chiang Rai, Thailand. His specialization is Peace and Conflict Studies, and he is a member of Thailand Peace and Conflict Studies Network, collaborating on research, academic activities, and academic services with four university partners in Thailand. At the administrative level, he has served as the Director of Asian Research Center for International Development and the Director of Global Relations Division of Mae Fah Luang University.

Dora Ching – Balancing Research/Teaching with Administration in a Hybrid Career

As an academic and administrator, Dora Ching has over twenty years of experience in running research projects (including her own), publishing, teaching, and overseeing the administration of a center. Such “hybrid” jobs are an alternative path toward a rewarding career in academia, and Chin is happy to share her experiences and advice for positioning oneself for such opportunities with mentorship session attendees.

Garrett Washington – Getting Your Academic Career Started: Preparing for Life after Graduate School

Garrett Washington is an associate professor at UMass Amherst, specializing in modern Japanese history and working in the histories of religion, women, and built space. Washington writes, “I feel that my background makes me a particularly good candidate for hosting such a session. I am one of very few Black scholars in my field. I hold a PhD from a public research university without a strong, renowned program in my field. Before arriving at UMass, I held postdoctoral and visiting positions. I now have tenure at UMass. I have extensive experience, acquired over the past 13 years since completing the PhD, of mentoring undergraduates (and graduate students). I hold or have held positions (Search Committee chair, Graduate Studies Committee member; disciplinary organization board member, DEI Director.) that qualify me to talk about the topics about which I propose to host a session. And I love leading discussion.”

Courtney Work – Getting Funding in Asian Studies

Courtney Work entered academia after many years managing bookstores for Barnes & Noble, graduating with a PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2014. She then spent 5 years on a research post-doc with the Institute for Social Studies, The Hague, and the Regional Center for Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University, researching the intersections of climate change policies and forest-based livelihoods in Cambodia and Myanmar. Now Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, Work continues her research in the Prey Lang Forest in north central Cambodia.

R. Kent Guy – Overcoming the Mid-Career Slump: Balancing Service, Teaching, and the Second Book Project

R. Kent Guy has taught graduate students for 20 years at the University of Washington, including terms as graduate director and department chair. During his career at UW, Guy has also given a lot of career advice, and participated in most personnel processes of the university. Guy will draw on these experiences to offer mentorship to scholars facing the prospect of working through a mid-career slump, or trying to avoid such an episode.

Xuelei Huang – Navigating the Job Market and Employment in Europe as an Immigrant

Xuelei Huang is a veteran of the continental European and UK academic job markets and will conduct a mentorship session for junior scholars interested in learning more about these career paths. Huang is now Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh, after studying at Fudan University (BA), Peking University (MA), and the University of Heidelberg (PhD). Before taking up her position in Edinburgh, Huang was a post-doctoral researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, a research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies in France and the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.

Robert Shepherd – Publishing in Asian Studies

Robert Shepherd is the Editor of Critical Asian Studies and a course coordinator at the Foreign Service Institute. In addition, he taught at George Washington University for two decades. His publications include articles and books on tourism, the politics of heritage preservation, and social changes in contemporary China.

Jessamyn Abel – Traveling a Non-Standard Career Path

Jessamyn Abel will share her experiences along a non-standard career path. After a postdoc, a one-year visiting professor job, and two years in a tenure-track position, Abel took a non-tenure-track position (for family reasons) and subsequently taught a 3-3 load for five years. Abel managed to turn that into a tenure-track job in 2014, and has since published two books and received tenure while teaching two courses per semester. This mentoring session will explore balancing act an active research and writing agenda while engaged in teaching-heavy positions, both contingent and tenure-track.

Alisa Freedman – Saying Yes and Saying No: Balancing Research, Teaching, Service, and More

Alisa Freedman has extensive experience in mentoring and fostering educational exchange. She is dedicated to promoting diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and transnationalism and to teaching the value of culture to understand international politics and the human condition. She has published 7 books (including 2 books with AAS) and around 40 articles for specialist and general audiences. She was a mentor for the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership Project (2022-2023) and the Oregon-Japan-Vietnam Exchange and Collaboration Project (2017-2020); Faculty Fellow for a university residence hall (2016-present); and advisor for around 40 graduate students. Mentorship is a key component of her Fulbright Scholar Award Vietnam (2024). As the Editor-in-Chief (2016-2022) of the U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal (peer-reviewed, University of Hawaii Press), she has mentored colleagues on publishing and personally edited 85 articles. She also has published 3 academic guides: “Publishing Books of Women’s Stories: Lessons from Women in Japanese Studies (CSWS Annual Review 2023), “Publishing in Academic Journals: Pro Tips from U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal,” (Project Muse, September 2022) and “Some Atypical (and Charmingly Oddball) Suggestions for Creating Belonging and Community in the Remote Classroom” (coauthored, Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 2021). Beyond that, she also researches the value of mentoring and collaboration. A prime example is Women in Japanese Studies: Memoirs from a Trailblazing Generation (AAS Asia Past and Present Book. Series, 2023). She cultivates methodologies for the emerging field of Japanese popular culture (“Introducing Japanese Popular Culture,” 2017 and 2023). She has held elected and nominated leadership positions, including AAS NEAC Chair (2019-2020).

Yvon Wang – Getting Your Academic Career Started: Preparing for Life after Graduate School

In addition to mentoring a number of undergrad, MA, and PhD students in History, East Asian Studies, and related departments, Yvon Wang has chaired a Professional Development committee for the last 2 years focused on graduate students. In addition, he has previously run workshops on publishing, conference and paper presentation tips, alt/non-ac career paths, formatting CVs, writing cover letters and other application materials, and navigating the job search process. To support graduate students, he holds mock Zoom interviews and mock job talks, drawing on his experiences serving on two candidate search committees. Engaging with younger scholars—both graduate student to recent PhDs—is his way of giving back to the field.

Ying Zhu – Making Public-Facing and Impactful Scholarship

To connect her academic research to a broader society, Ying Zhu has led and participated in collaborative projects ranging from book publishing to event organizing in scholarly, lay-public, and mixed outreach settings. In particular, she has led workshops on appearing as an expert on radio, TV, and online platforms.

Sara Liao – Navigating the Job Market and Employment in the US, Canada, and Europe as an Immigrant

Sara Liao is a Chinese scholar who has spent the past 16 years studying and working in multicultural environments, including mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the United States. She got her first academic job in Hong Kong after graduating from University of Texas-Austin, then moved to the U.S. three years later amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. As a woman of color and early career scholar, she has significant experiences in the job market and at different institutions and is eager to help others in preparing and navigating academic work and career.

Lauren Pfister – Developing Cross-Cultural Humanities-based Research Projects within Asian Studies

Lauren Pfister (PhD, Comparative (Sino-European-American) Philosophy) has published books and articles in comparative philosophical, religious and translation studies. His major emphases in research and publications on Chinese Ruist (Confucian) and Daoist philosophical and religious studies, writing histories of Chinese philosophical studies, Sino-European comparative philosophical studies, Sino-Christian studies, Christianity and other religions in China, hermeneutics of the translation of classical Chinese works into Anglo-European languages. Pfister has also written about post-secularity internationally and in China, philosophy of culture, online ethics and their problems (in China), the methods and problems of dialogic pedagogical mentoring.

Rivi Handler-Spitz – Advancing Your Research While Teaching

Rivi Handler-Spitz had a rather challenging transition from graduate school to teaching as a non-native speaker of the language and culture in which she works. After changing jobs after passing year-three, pre-tenure review, she made tenure at another institution. After getting tenure, without a project in the pipeline, she had difficulty developing the next project and turned to teaching to help her figure out what would be next. Her experiences in this area would primarily be useful to other people who also teach in liberal arts colleges. While working at a liberal arts college, she has published three books—a monograph, a collaboratively edited volume of scholarly essays, and an edited volume of translations. She has also published in journals in the United States, Taiwan, and Europe. Her current project is in graphic narrative format. Handler-Spitz would be glad to share her experiences related to publishing in any of these places or formats.

Hiroko Matsuda – Getting Your Academic Career Started in East Asia

Hiroko Matsuda received her doctoral degree in History from the Australian National University and is currently teaching at a private university in Kobe, Japan. Before coming to Kobe, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore (2007-2008), postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History in Academia Sinica, Taiwan (2008-2010), and JSPS fellow at Sophia University in Japan (2010-2013). While teaching in Japan, she published numerous journal articles, book chapters as well as monographs both in English and Japanese. Her monograph in English, Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border Crossings from Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan (2019, University of Hawaii Press) was “Highly Commended” by the Asian Studies Association of Australia in 2020. She would like to share her experiences of teaching and publishing in English and Japanese while moving around Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan.

Micah Muscolino – Getting Your Academic Career Started: Preparing for Life after Graduate School

Micah Muscolino (University of California, San Diego) has successfully navigated the early stages of an academic career as a historian of modern China. His first book, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2009), focused on the history of China’s most important marine fishery, the waters around the Zhoushan Islands, from its nineteenth-century expansion to the exhaustion of its main commercial fish stocks in the 1970s. His second book, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 (2015) engaged with the historiography of war and militarization in modern China and the interdisciplinary scholarship on war and the environment in world history. He has also published numerous articles on China’s place in global environmental history, maritime connections between Mainland China and Taiwan, energy history, and the history of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. As organizer and editor of the “Historical Perspectives on China’s Environment” series for chinadialogue.net, he seeks to heighten the impact of Chinese environmental history by making cutting-edge academic research accessible to journalists, NGOs, and policymakers. He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ with funding from a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an invited Visiting Professor at Harvard University. His research has also received fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the Chiang Chiang-kuo Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Muscolino taught at St. Mary’s College of California, Georgetown University, and the University of Oxford before coming to UCSD in 2018. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern China and environmental history, he directs Ph.D. students working on all topics in Chinese history during late Qing, Republican, and PRC periods.

Ming Dong Gu – Publishing in Asian Studies

Ming Dong Gu, Ph.D. (University of Chicago), is Katherine R. Cecil Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of five English monographs: (1) The Nature and Rationale of Zen/Chan and Enlightenment: The Mind of a Pre-natal Baby (Routledge 2024); (2) Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); (3) Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Post-colonialism (Routledge, 2013); (4) Chinese Theories of Reading and Writing (SUNY Press 2005), (5) Chinese Theories of Fiction (SUNY Press 2006), and one book in Chinese: (5) Anxiety of Originality (Nanjing University Press, 2009); editor of three English books: Translating China for Western Readers (SUNY Press, 2014), Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters (Routledge 2018), and Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (2019); and a co-editor of three volumes. His articles appear in Journal of Asian Studies, Philosophy East & West (7 articles), Journal of Chinese Philosophy (4 articles), Asian Philosophy, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (3 articles), Philosophy and Literature, Journal of Oriental Studies, Monumenta Serica, International Communications of Chinese Culture (2 articles), Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Translation Review, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Diacritics, Postcolonial Studies, Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetic Education (2 articles), Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies (two articles), Contemporary Chinese Thought, European Review, and other journals.

Ji Li – Navigating the Job Market in Hong Kong

After receiving a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ji Li moved to Hong Kong as a postdoctoral fellow at CUHK, followed by five years of experience as a Research Assistant Professor (a non-tenure-track position popular in Hong Kong). Li transitioned into a tenure-track position and finally got tenured at HKU in 2023. As an initial outsider to Hong Kong academia, she has experienced different stages in Hong Kong academia and would like to share these experience with junior colleagues who are interested in working in Hong Kong.

James Benn – Grant Applications in Asian Studies

Dr. James A. Benn, Professor and former Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, was trained primarily as a scholar of medieval Chinese religions (Buddhism and Taoism). He has 25 years experience in Asian Studies, including 5 years as a Department Chair, and has served on multiple grants and fellowships committees. His former PhD students have tenure or tenure-track jobs, and he would like to use the mentor session to focus on grant writing.

Bret Hinsch – Publishing in Asian Studies

Bret Hinsch’s research focuses on Chinese history, especially topics regarding women and masculinity. I taught Chinese history (in Mandarin to Taiwanese students) at Fo Huang University and National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. He has an extensive publication record and would like to discuss the ins and outs of publishing in Asian Studies.

Danielle Rocheleau Salaz – Non-Teaching Employment Opportunities in Area Studies and International Education

Danielle Rocheleau Salaz has been in an Asian area studies center at the University of Colorado since 2005 and previously worked at a Japanese consulate. With a Masters in Japanese and a deep connection to the field of Asian Studies, she has found that there are a multitude of ways to stay connected to the field through grant writing, strategic planning, and program establishment and implementation. This mentoring session is a great opportunity to learn how a background in Asian Studies can be useful beyond the classroom.