EAA Articles Archive - Association for Asian Studies

Editor’s Note: Please see the essay review of Professor Fuller’s book. This is our twenty-third consecutive interview with the recipient of the AAS Franklin R. Buchanan Prize. This year’s winner is Michael A. Fuller, who is the author of An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty. The textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers―in...

An EAA interview with the 2016 Franklin R. Buchanan Prizewinners Dorinda Neave, Lara C. W. Blanchard, and Marika Sardar for Asian Art

This is our twentieth consecutive interview with the recipients of the AAS Franklin R. Buchanan Prize. This year’s winners are Dorinda Neave, Lara Blanchard, and Marika Sardar, who are coauthors of the textbook Asian Art (Pearson, 2014). Asian Art is an accessible introduction for students to Asian art history, the emergence and evolution of Asian art in all its diversity, and the patterns of continuity and change between the arts and cultures of various regions comprising Asia. Dorinda Neave ...

Professional Basketball in Taiwan: An EAA Interview with Ben Metcalf

Ben Metcalf is currently the Head Coach of the professional Pure Youth basketball team in Taipei, Taiwan. A lifelong basketball fan, he spent his formative years living overseas in Japan, England, and Turkey before moving back to the US. After graduating from George Washington University in 2003, he worked for the Orlando Magic before ultimately moving to Taiwan to learn Mandarin. In the following eight years, he was a part of four Taiwanese professional basketball championship teams and helped ...

Vocational Students and International Education: An EAA Interview with United States–Japan Foundation Elgin Heinz Prizewinner, Robert Clavelle

Robert (Bob) Clavelle is the Instructor of the Building Trades Program at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center in White River Junction, Vermont. He has a strong passion for Japan, its people, and culture. In the summer of 2000, he was provided an opportunity to be a participant in the University of Vermont’s Asian Studies Outreach Program Institute in Japan, a three-week study program funded by the United States–Japan Foundation (USJF) with a focus on learning Japanese culture and ...

Feature Article

Indonesia, Asia, and the World: An Interview with Leonard C. Sebastian

Leonard C. Sebastian is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Indonesia Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). He received his PhD from the Australian National University in 1997. Dr. Sebastian is author of Realpolitik Ideology: Indonesia’s Use of Military Force (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) and has been published in a number of journals, including The Journal of Strategic Studies, Indonesia, Defense & Security Analysis, the Cambridge Revie...

The 2015 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Winners for “My Cambodia” and “My Cambodian America”

This is our nineteenth consecutive interview with the recipients of the AAS Franklin R. Buchanan Prize. This year’s winners are Rylan Sekiguchi and Risa Morimoto, who developed the free multimedia education package My Cambodia and My Cambodian America, published by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) online at stanford.io/1sI162V. SPICE serves as a bridge between Stanford University and K–12 schools and community colleges by developing multidisciplinary...

Columns, EAA Interview

Interview with 2014 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize Winners for “Indian Independence and the Question of Partition”

This is our eighteenth consecutive interview with the recipients of the AAS Franklin Buchanan Prize. This year’s winners are Leah Elliott (writer), Maya Lindberg (writer), and Tanya Waldburger (videographer), who developed the curriculum unit Indian Independence and the Question of Partition, published by The Choices Program, a national education initiative at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Choices Program curriculum developers also won the Buchanan Prize in 2...

Online Supplement

Basic Facts: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan

KYRGYZSTAN Geography and Population Area: 124,244 square miles; slightly smaller than the area of South Dakota. Population: 5.55 million. Government Type: Republic Chief of State: President Almazbek Atambayev. Head of Government: Prime Minister Zhantoro Satybaldiyev (appointed by president). Elections: Popular vote every six years. Legislative Branch: Unicameral Supreme Council (Jogorku Kengesh) (120 seats, five year terms). Judicial Highest Courts: Supreme Court...

An EAA Interview with 2013 Franklin R. Buchanan Winner Constantine Vaporis

This is our seventeenth consecutive interview with recipients of the AAS Franklin Buchanan Prize. This year’s winner is Constantine Vaporis (PhD, Princeton University), for his outstanding book Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life during the Age of the Shoguns. Dr. Vaporis is the Director of Asian Studies and Professor at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He teaches Japanese and East Asian History and has received numerous fellowships for research in Ja...

Social Media in the South Korean Presidential Election: An Interview with Hoon Lee

by Hoon Lee, Lucien Ellington

Hoon Lee (PhD, Communication, University of Michigan) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Prior to the doctoral program at Michigan, he studied the political economy of East Asia at Stanford University. Lee’s current research agenda centers on emerging social media and how they intersect with interpersonal communication to shape the attitudes and behaviors of ci...

Resources

The Taliban, Women, and Human Rights

The Taliban took control of Afghanistan’s government in 1996 and ruled until it was driven from power during the 2001 US-led invasion. The Taliban provided safe haven to al-Qaeda, an Islamic extremist organization that publicly executed criminals and outlawed education for women and girls. (note 1) Today, although progress has been made, and education is more accessible than under the Taliban, more than half of all Afghan girls still do not attend school. Underneath the surface of reported ...

Resources

The Afghanistan War: Diverse Voices and Viewpoints

Bing West’s Home Page http://www.bingwest.com/ Bing West served as assistant secretary of defense for international security aﬀairs in the Reagan administration. Bing was a combat Marine in Việt Nam, authored the counterinsurgency classic, The Village, and has been on hundreds of patrols in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Việt Nam. He has published widely on the war in numerous periodicals and journals, including Foreign Aﬀairs and The Wall Street Journal. West is a leading critique of the ...

Resources

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

The Buddhas of Bamiyan looked over the Bamiyan Valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan for fifteen centuries. The two statues were carved into the side of a sandstone cliff at the foot of the Hindu Kush Mountains of central Afghanistan in 507 and 554 CE in the valley 140 miles northwest of Kabul. The Taliban destroyed them in March 2001— six months before the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City—in an attempt to cleanse the country of idolatry. (note 1) Af...

Interview with Master Sergeant Michael W. Howland: The War in Afghanistan

Master Sergeant Michael W. Howland (MSG) is currently Senior Military Instructor for the award-winning University of Mississippi ROTC program. MSG Howland entered active duty in the United States Army in 1988 when he enlisted as an Infantryman and graduated from Basic/AIT and Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 2000, he was assigned to US Army Special Operations Command, where he served until being assigned to the Rebel Battalion at the University of Mississippi in June 2010. MSG Howlan...

Feature Article

Geographical Facts about Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a landlocked country slightly smaller than Texas, situated in southwestern Asia on the Iranian Plateau. The Hindu Kush mountain range runs northeast to southwest and divides the northern provinces from the rest of the country. On the north, Afghanistan borders Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan; in the east, China; in the west, Iran; and in the south, Pakistan. Borders and Topography The total length of the Afghanistan border is 3,436 miles, and 44 percent of that border�...

EAA Interview with the Authors of “Fragments of the Afghan Frontier,” Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden

by Benjamin D. Hopkins, Lucien Ellington, Magnus Marsden

Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden are, respectively, a historian and an anthropologist. In 2011, they coauthored Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. The book is intended for both the public and scholars. In his review of Fragments, Mark Beautement, former UK Ministry of Defence district political officer in Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan during 2009–10, who worked with British Commandos and US Marines, commented, “Fragments of the Afghan Frontier combines painstaking recent anthrop...

An EAA Interview with 2012 Franklin R. Buchanan Co-Prize Winners for The United States in Afghanistan,The Choices Program: Andy Blackadar, Sarah Massey, and Tanya Waldburger

by Andy Blackadar, Lucien Ellington, Sarah Massey, Tanya Waldbu

This is our sixteenth consecutive interview with recipients of the AAS Franklin Buchanan Prize. Normally, we publish the interview and accompanying curriculum materials review in the winter issue, but because of our special section, we moved this segment to the fall issue. The 2012 Buchanan Prize winners were Andy Blackadar, Sarah Massey, and Tanya Waldburger, who, along with colleagues at the “The Choices for the 21st Century Education Program,” a national education initiative developed at ...

An EAA Interview with 2011 Franklin R. Buchanan Co-Prize Winner Peter Perdue

This is our fifteenth consecutive interview with recipients of the Franklin Buchanan Prize. This year’s cowinners are Yale University historian Peter C. Perdue and Lynn Parisi, Director of the Program for Teaching East Asia at the University of Colorado. China and the World: The Rise and Fall of the Canton Trading System is now a component of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Visualizing Cultures digital teaching project at http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/rise_fall_canton_01...

EAA Interview

American and European Missionaries in East Asia: An Interview with Professor Donald Clark

by Donald Clark, Lucien Ellington

Donald Clark is the Murchison Professor of History and Co-Director of East Asian Studies at Trinity University. He also serves as Director of Trinity’s International Studies Program. He teaches courses on China, Japan, Korea, and the history of American foreign relations with a research focus on Korea, where he spent much of his life as the son of missionaries. In addition to writing books and journal articles on a variety of East Asian topics, Professor Clark has also published two works that...

Tibetan-Chinese Relations: An EAA Interview with A. Tom Grunfeld