Anna Leon Shulman and Frank Joseph Shulman Announce Their Retirement from the Bibliography of Asian Studies

Frank Joseph Shulman and Anna Leon Shulman

We regret to share the news that Anna Leon Shulman, editor of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), and Frank Joseph Shulman, BAS associate editor, have informed the Association for Asian Studies that they will retire on December 31, 2020. Anna and Frank Shulman have dedicated a combined 85 years of service to the BAS, and both the AAS and BAS communities will feel their absence deeply.

Anna Shulman began as the East Asia associate editor of the BAS in 1985 and has served full-time as its editor since 1993. Frank Shulman worked as an assistant editor between 1970 and 1972, subsequently served as a consultant, and has worked more than half time since the mid-1990s as one of the publication’s associate editors for East Asia. In a message conveying the news of their impending retirement, the Shulmans write:

During the past fifty years, we have witnessed, participated in, and helped lead and direct a number of developments that have transformed the BAS from an annual printed bibliography of the books, articles, and chapters in edited volumes published during a single year to a cumulative, periodically updated, increasingly annotated database of over 935,000 bibliographical entries on East, Southeast, and South Asia. We are most appreciative of the opportunities that we have had to contribute to the field of Asian Studies in this way. We are grateful for the ongoing cooperation that we have received from the Secretariat of the Association for Asian Studies, from both the past and present members of the BAS team of associate editors and advisory committee members, from many academic libraries and in particular from the University of Maryland College Park Libraries, and from librarians, editors, publishers, and colleagues around the world.

With their retirement, Anna and Frank Shulman intend to travel (once conditions are safe to do so), as well as complete work on two long-term projects: a multivolume, annotated bibliography of some 15,000 Western-language studies entitled “The First Century of Doctoral Dissertation on Korea, 1903-2004” (to be published by the University of Michigan Press), and organizing their Asian Studies Newsletter Archives, a paper-based collection of ephemeral newsletters and bulletins issued from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. They will continue to reside in College Park, Maryland.

All of us at the AAS thank Anna and Frank Shulman for their dedication to the Bibliography of Asian Studies and wish them well in retirement.

We will make further announcements regarding the BAS leadership transition as soon as possible.