April 2019 AAS Member News & Notes

Two AAS Members are among the 168 scholars, artists, and writers named 2019 recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships. Congratulations to Michael K. Bourdaghs (University of Chicago) and Lothar von Falkenhausen (University of California, Los Angeles).

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Congratulations to the AAS Members who have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support their scholarly work:

Todd Lewis (College of the Holy Cross), “Dharma and Punya: Buddhist Ritual Art of Nepal” exhibition

Kathryn Meyer (Wright State University), “Aviation and Nation Building in Wartime Manchuria”

Jennifer Ortegren (Middlebury College), “New Neighbors, New Muslims: Gender, Class, and Community in Contemporary India”

Jessica Starling (Lewis and Clark College), “Leprosy, Social Work, and Ethical Praxis in Contemporary Japanese Buddhism”

Rina Williams (University of Cincinnati), “Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in India, 1915–2015”

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We are pleased to note that six AAS Members have been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies for the 2019-20 academic year. We congratulate these scholars and look forward to seeing their projects come to fruition:

Anthony Barbieri-Low (University of California, Santa Barbara), “The Black Land and the Middle Kingdom: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient Egypt and Early China”

Andrea S. Goldman (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Frenchman and the Chinese Opera: Imperialism, Homoeroticism, and Transnational Masculinities in China, 1900-1950”

Calvin Hui (College of William and Mary), “Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China”

Satoko Shimazaki (University of Southern California), “Kabuki Actors, Print Technology, and the Theatrical Origins of Modern Media”

Xiaofei Tian (Harvard University), “Writing Empire and Self: Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China”

Marcia Yonemoto (University of Colorado, Boulder), “The Ties that Bind: Adult Adoption and Family Formation in Japan, 1700-1925”

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The Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award is conferred yearly and administered through the Association for Asian Studies. In accordance with the wishes of the George Chaplin family, each year a prize of $1,000 is awarded to either a full-time instructor of Japanese at the college level or a current graduate student for excellence in Japanese language teaching. The selection committee is pleased to announce this year’s recipient. The award will be conferred to Dr. Kasumi Yamazaki (Assistant Professor, University of Toledo). Dr. Yamazaki has demonstrated excellence in all aspects of teaching, research, and service. Her efforts in curriculum development using innovative technology are especially commendable. After a thorough review of her work, the committee members feel confident that Dr. Yamazaki will continue to make important contributions to the field of Japanese pedagogy.

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Mina Roces

The Philippine Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies is pleased to award the Grant Goodman Prize for 2019 to Mina Roces for her substantial contributions to Philippine historical studies. Roces is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Professor Roces had her interest in history sparked while an honors student at the University of Sydney before she took up graduate study at the University of Michigan. Since receiving her doctorate in 1990, Professor Roces has held a leadership role in Philippine historical studies with increased focus on women’s history and studies of gender. Her first book, Women, Power and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-War Philippines, appeared in 1998 in the United States with a subsequent printing in the Philippines two years later. This first major publication was followed by an expanded version of her dissertation under the title of Kinship Politics in Post-War Philippines: The Lopez Family, 1946-2000, published by De La Salle University Press. These titles were followed by the 2012 University of Hawaii Press publication, Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1985-2006. And her most recent manuscript, Gender in Southeast Asia, is contracted for delivery to Cambridge University Press this coming October. She has proposed original interpretations of the cultural construction of the feminine, the cultural side of the feminist movement, and the politics of national dress, and more recently on migration.

As one commentator has stated: “Her body of work unravels a nuanced take on the ways, gender, migration, and politics are intertwined thereby expanding the manner in which we look at current issues in Philippine society and beyond.” (Dr. Jean Encinas-Franco, Political Science, University of the Philippines, Diliman)

In addition to these major publications, Professor Roces has co-edited a series of six books on topics Women in Asia (including women’s movements), Asian Marriage and Migration, and the politics of dress in Asia and the Americas. Additionally, she has published twenty-three book chapters and sixteen articles in major peer-reviewed journals. She has also served as a regional editor for the journal Asian Studies Review from 2008 to 2015. To support her ambitious research agenda, Professor Roces has receive major external grants and five visiting fellowships (in The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark), as well as being invited to give fully funded lectures on annual basis since 2010 in addition to her many presentations at academic conferences. In 2016, she was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in recognition of her contribution to the scholarship of gender and history.

Her forthcoming publications include: The Filipino Migration Experience, 1906-2017, a book-length study on the history from the perspective of the Filipino migrant (currently under review), and a book on the history of Filipino women as consumers since 1946.

Were this outpouring of high quality scholarly studies and activities not enough, Professor Roces is an active member of her department and has received teaching awards at both her college and university levels. She supports the work of other Asian and Asian American studies scholars as Book Series editor of the Sussex Academic Press’s Sussex Library of Asian and Asian American studies book series.

The Philippine Studies Group is pleased to acknowledge the outstanding scholarly achievement that Professor Mina Roces has shown throughout her career and confer upon her the 2019 Grant Goodman Prize in Philippine History and Historical Studies. It is fitting that a gender studies scholar be the first woman to receive this award.  —Submitted by Paul Rodell, Chair, Grant Goodman Committee of the Philippine Studies Group

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The Northeast Asia Council of the AAS is accepting applications from institutions seeking to host a visit by one of the members of the NEAC Distinguished Speakers Bureau. The DSB offers smaller institutions without large East Asian Studies programs the opportunity to invite a senior scholar of Japan or Korea to their campus. The AAS will pay the DSB scholar’s airfare and honorarium, with the host institution responsible for local expenses. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, though funds for each six-month budgetary period are limited.

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Regional Conferences

Many of our AAS-affiliated regional conferences are preparing for their fall 2019 meetings. The following have issued calls for proposals:

Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs: Conference hosted by Michigan State University, October 4-6. Deadline for proposals May 11.

New York Conference on Asian Studies: Conference hosted by SUNY New Paltz, October 4-5. Deadline for proposals May 1.

Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies: Conference hosted by Dickinson College, October 11-13. Deadline for proposals May 17.

Southwest Conference on Asian Studies: Conference hosted by St. Edward’s University, October 18-19. Deadline for proposals June 30.

Western Conference on Asian Studies: Conference hosted by El Colegio de México, October 18-19. Deadline for proposals June 28.

We welcome submissions for the AAS Member News & Notes column, so please forward material for consideration to mcunningham@asianstudies.org. Please note that we do not publish book announcements in this space; new books by AAS Members will be announced on the association’s Twitter feed (@AASAsianStudies) and Facebook page (@AASAsianStudies).