Postdoctoral Fellows, 2010 – Present

Knox College (2022-2024)
Chirasree Mukherjee (Ph.D. Candidate, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)

Fields of Interest: International Relations and Comparative Politics; Religion and Conflict; International Terrorism, Democratization and Foreign Policy.

In her research, Chirasree Mukherjee grapples with intractable conflicts, especially those fought on religious grounds. Relying on both qualitative and quantitative analysis, she concentrates on conflicts between Hinduism and Islam in India to understand how the deep-seated religious cleavage between Hindus and Muslims germinate violence, resulting in intractable conflicts. She is the first woman in her family to pursue a doctoral degree and to travel overseas for higher education in United States.

Moravian College (2021-23)
Dorothee Xiaolong Hou (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis)

Fields of Interest: Asian Cinema and World Cinema; Modern and Contemporary Sinophone Literature; Globalization, Migration and Urbanization; Language Pedagogy. Critical Theory.

Dorothee’s dissertation is entitled Space, Place, and the “Stories-so-far”: Reimagining China’s Rust Belt in Literature and Film. She is the author of “Literary Review of Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain,’” Research on Modern English Teaching, Jul. 2013, and “Mobility, Displacement and Social Reproduction: Two Recent Films on Women’s Outmigration from China’s Rust Belt,” Remapping the Homeland: Affective Geographies and Cultures of the Chinese Diaspora, edited by Robert Tally and Melody Li, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.  Dorothee is also lead author of “The Time-Image and the Unknown in Wong Kar-wai’s Film Art.” The Fascination with Unknown Time, edited by Klaus Oschema, Sibylle Baumbach, and Lena Henningsen, PalgraveMacmillan, 2017. In addition, she is the translator of, Zhai Yueqin, “The Tragic Spirit of the East: The ‘Drama of Sounds’ in Yang Mu’s Poems,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews. In the fall she will be teaching two courses: “Introduction to Chinese Cinema” and “Monsters in Asian Culture.” 

Dr. Hou has accepted a tenure-track position at Moravian College to begin in the 2023-24 academic year.

St. Lawrence University (2021-23)
Irma Hidayana (Ed.D., Teachers College-Columbia University, 2019)

Irma Hidayana is a public health scholar and activist whose research focuses on the impact of the baby food industry on maternal and child health in Southeast Asia. Her dissertation, “Addressing Multinational Corporations’ Aggressive Marketing of Commercial Formula in Indonesia and the Cessation of Breastfeeding through the Design and Evaluation of a Counter-marketing Continuing Education Module,” examines a key public-health problem: multinational corporations’ aggressive marketing of their commercial formula as a breast-milk substitute, which leads to many women around the globe abandoning breastfeeding, and thus missing out on the many health benefits it offers for developing infants and their mothers. This also contributes to the current stunting problem in some developing countries, including Indonesia. Moreover, highly populated countries in Southeast Asia are the biggest target markets for the formula industry—due in part to rising incomes, modernization, urbanization, and globalization in the region, all of which are generating demand for formula. The industry’s marketing practices undermine breastfeeding and harm mothers and infants, which raises serious concerns for global maternal and child health.

She manifests her scholarly works into real-world public health advocacy initiatives. Utilizing the advance of health innovation, she developed an advocacy platform to monitor violations of the WHO-UNICEF International code of marketing of breastmilk substitutes in Indonesia which helps both the government and civil society to protect breastfeeding from unethical marketing practices by the baby food industry. She also co-founded LaporCOVID-19, a citizen-led data project, using an open-source platform that allows people to engage in COVID-19 related data and information advocacy.

Dr. Hidayana received a B.A. in Philosophy from Gadjah Mada University and an MPH in Public Health from Montclair State University. In 2019 she received a Ph.D. in Health Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

At St. Lawrence, she will be teaching courses on Maternal and Child Health (MCH) in Southeast Asia; commercial determinants of MCH in Southeast Asia; infant and young child feeding culture in Southeast Asia; and breastfeeding and human rights in Southeast Asia.

Wilmington College (2021-22)
Nguyet Nguen (Ph.D., American University, 2019)

Dr. Nguyen was born and raised in Vietnam in one of the most beautiful places on earth called Halong Bay. She completed her Ph.D. in History from American University (Washington, D.C.) via a Fulbright Fellowship in 2019. In addition to her academic training and teaching, Nguyet has worked for NGOs, and governmental agencies, and also as a journalist and interpreter.

Nguyet is passionate about teaching and growing knowledge by sharing ideas; she has found that she learns a great deal from her students. Her research and teaching areas include the Vietnam War and US Foreign Relations, Asian Studies, Asian History, Gender Studies, Imperialism and Decolonization. She is currently working on a manuscript regarding how Vietnamese in both Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora initiated and fostered the global antiwar movement, including that in the United States.

At Wilmington College, Nguyet will teach courses on World Civilization, Asian History, and the Vietnam War.

Dr. Nguen began a tenure-track position at the University of Alaska–Southwest in Fall 2022.

Denison University (2020-21)
Jue Liang (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2020)

Jue Liang is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhist literature, history, and culture. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Life, Lives, and Afterlife of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel, examines the literary tradition surrounding the matron saint of Tibet, Yeshe Tsogyel, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also presents the blossoming of this literary tradition in tandem with the efforts to trace their religious pedigree and define what counts as authentic Buddhism by Nyingma Tibetan Buddhists. She is currently working on a second project titled Who Is a Buddhist Feminist: Theorizing Gender and Religion in Contemporary Tibet. It is a study on the history, discourse, and social effects of the khenmo program, a gender-equality initiative that has been taking place at Tibetan Buddhist institutions in China for the past three decades. Jue is also an active participant in discussions on Buddhism in both academic and public forums.

At Denison University, Jue will be teaching courses on Buddhism, Hinduism, and religions in Southeast Asia. She is excited to be introducing students to the many emanations of these religious traditions in the past and present, in places far and near.

Since completing her postdoc, she has held a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Denison.

New College of Florida (2019-21)
Kent Cao (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2019)

Kent Cao is a specialist in the field of art and archaeology of early China with a broad interest in the interconnections within East Asia. From art historical and technical perspectives, his first monograph manuscript examines the rise of indigenous bronze industry in the middle Yangtze River region in the latter second millennium BCE. In the fifteenth century BCE, the Erligang state expanded from the Central Plain, and along the way disseminated its highly established form of bronze art and metallurgy. Understanding how the Yangtze region digested this exotic art form and independently developed its own bronze art allows us to better understand the formation of China from a frontier perspective. This work reveals how ideas and technologies were transregionally transmitted in early complex societies. Kent Cao’s next book project explores the revival of bronze archaism and antiquarianism in Song China and Kamakura Japan, and aims to offer a deeper insight into the political aspirations, ritual prestige and artistic regeneration of Medieval East Asia. During his fellowship at NCF, Kent Cao is teaching Mainland, Peninsula and Archipelago: Introduction to East Asian Art and Archaeology, a survey course on the foundational intellectual landmarks in East Asian Art and Archaeology. In the spring, he is teaching Court, Studio, Monastery and Market: Art Production and Circulation in East Asia and Beyond, an upper-division course which brings students to explore the interwoven relations between various agencies in art creation and consumption in East Asia, and its associated exchange with Central Asia and the West, and Think like a Caster: Art, Archaeology and Technology of Bronze Age China, a seminar focuses on close reading and examination of art historical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in the field of Chinese Bronze Studies.
Kent won the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, and will be joining Duke Kunshan University and Duke University as an Assistant Professor in September 2021.

Bowdoin College (2019-20)
Christine Marrewa Karwoski (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2019)

Christine Marrewa Karwoski is a cultural and religious historian of South Asia who focuses on the confluence of language, literature, and politics in North India over the longue durée. Her current research focuses on communal identity formation and the literature of the Nath yogis (most well-known for their connection with Hatha yoga) from the 17th through the 20th centuries. She examines the religious fluidity of this community of yogis during the early-modern period and questions how colonialism, modernity, and print affected the manner in which the Nath yogis have come to express themselves in their own literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. At Bowdoin College she teaches Epics Across Oceans, a class on the diversity of Indian epics across South and Southeast Asia, The Tigresses’ Snare, a class on the place of gender in asceticism and yoga in South and Southeast Asia, and Militancy and Monasticism in South and Southeast Asia.

Austin College (2017-19)
Larissa Pitts (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2017)

Larissa Pitts is a historian whose research and teaching focuses on modern China. She earned her B.A. in Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project “Seeing the Forest from the Trees: Scientific Forestry and the Rise of Modern Chinese Environmentalism, 1864 – 1937” narrates the rise of state involvement in defining and managing China’s woodlands. She argues that in promoting the conservation and expansion of woodlands, Chinese states fostered the rise of a modern environmental consciousness in line with contemporary developments in world history. This meant that the condition and size of China’s forestland would serve as a barometer for state capacity for both Chinese citizens and international observers alike. Dr. Pitts is also developing a second project on the imagination, management, and commodification of Manchuria’s big cats in the early twentieth century. She will use this as a lens through which to explore the effects of changing market structures on China’s relationship with its wildlife. At Austin College, she is teaching modern East Asian history, introductory Chinese language, and Chinese politics. She is particularly looking forward to introducing her students to the history of China’s environment and its northern borderlands.

In Fall 2019, Dr. Pitts began a tenure-track position at Quinnipiac University.

Kenyon College (2017-18)
Arun Brahmbhatt (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2017)

Arun Brahmbhatt is a scholar of religion in South Asia whose research is focused on the use of Sanskrit in text, print, liturgy, and ritual in modern Hindu traditions. His dissertation, “Scholastic Publics: Sanskrit Textual Practices in Gujarat, 1800-Present,” examines the negotiation of language, place, and modernity in the formation of religious community in colonial and contemporary western India. Before joining the doctoral program in the Study of Religion and South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, he received a BA in Comparative Religion and English from Tufts University and an MTS in South Asian Religions from Harvard Divinity School. His research has been supported by fellowships through the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Series, the Fulbright Program, and the American Academy of Religion. During his teaching fellowship year at Kenyon College, he taught courses on Global Hinduism, religion in Southeast Asia, and the life of Hindu Epic literature.

In Fall 2018, Dr. Arun Brahmbhatt began a tenure-track position as assistant professor of religious studies at St. Lawrence University.

Lewis & Clark College (2017-19)
Layoung Shin (Ph.D., Binghamton University, 2015)

Layoung Shin is a sociocultural anthropologist who researches queer youth and fandom culture in South Korea. She completed her PhD at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2015. Her dissertation, entitled “Fashioning Subjectivity and Community among Young Queer Women in Seoul,” explores how neoliberal social change – both in capitalism and as an ideology – affects sexual norms, subjectivity and communities among working class queer youth in South Korea and reveals new forms of hierarchies and exclusion, including hierarchies within LGBT communities and solidifying pre-existing social inequalities. Further, she has conducted researches on young women’s same-sex sexuality in relation to pop culture, fandom and costume-play. Through ethnographic research on how young women’s sexuality is constructed through media consumption and performing like celebrities, her projects have demonstrated how both media and embodiment are vital for the construction of non-heteronormative desire.

Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Center for Korean Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University, and she has taught a variety of Anthropology and Asian/Korean courses at University of California, San Diego and Binghamton University. At Lewis & Clark College she will teach Cultural Politics of Youth in East Asia, Contemporary Korean Culture, and Queer Theory in East Asia.

Union College (2016-17)
Daniel Johnson (PhD, University of Chicago, 2015)

Daniel Johnson is a media scholar whose teaching and research focus on the intersections between film, television, and games. He earned a BA in Film and Media Studies from the University of Rochester, and completed a combined PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He has also attended the Middlebury College summer language school and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama. His research has been published in the journals Japanese Studies and Games and Culture, as well as the edited volume Media Convergence in Japan. He is currently completing a book manuscript on Japanese language internet media. Before coming to Union College in the Fall of 2016 he taught at New York University and the University of California, Riverside. At Union he taught courses on Japanese film and media culture.

Wabash College  (2016-17)
Sundar Vadlamudi (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2016)

Sundar Vadlamudi is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. His research areas include Islam in South Asia, Indian Ocean Trade, Economic History of South Asia, and Socio-religious Reform Movements in India. His dissertation, “Merchants in Transition: Maritime Trade and Society of Tamil Muslims in the Indian Ocean, c. 1780-1840,” examines the maritime trade of a community of South Indian merchants during the period of transition to colonial rule in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sundar examines the implications of these developments on Tamil Muslim merchants, who had a long history of participation in Indian Ocean trade. Currently, he is working on revising the dissertation into a book manuscript. Sundar received his B.E. (Computer Science) from Thiagarajar College of Engineering (India) and an M.A. (International Policy Studies) from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He worked for three years as a Researcher on international security issues in South Asia before enrolling in the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. During his fellowship year at Wabash College, Sundar taught “South Asia in World History, 1200 – 2000 CE, a survey course on World History, and a course on the Trade and Travel in the Indian Ocean.

 

 

In Fall 2017, Dr. Sundar Vadlamudi began a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Sharjah (UAE).

 

Bucknell University (2015-16)
Ketaki Pant (Ph.D., Duke University, 2015)

Ketaki Pant is a historian and anthropologist whose research focuses on ecumenical Islam in South Asia and its encounters with imperial political economy. Her current book project, based on her dissertation “Homes of Capital: Merchants and Mobility across Indian Ocean Gujarat,” examines merchant homes as semiotically charged sites where imperial political economy came into contact with longer histories of Islamic itinerancy that shaped the Indian Ocean world from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gujarat’s Muslim merchants were active across imperial port-cities from Arabia to Southeast Asia but continued to maintain historic homes in ports of Gujarat. Her book explores the imaginative and cultural practices merchants developed around their historic homes to reconcile the multiple spatial and cultural attachments that were entailed in this dual identity of being both imperial and Muslim. She is also developing a second project on the peripatetic zenanas (harems) of Hyderabad, which traces the histories of Indo-Arabian families active across South Asia and their encounters with the British colonial state. Dr. Pant received a B.A. in History and Africana Studies from Bard College and an M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. In 2015 she received a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Harvard University’s Asia Center and Women’s Studies at Duke University. At Bucknell, she will be teaching courses on Islam in Asia; sex, gender, and family in colonial Asia; and material culture in Asia.

 

 

Dr. Ketaki Pant was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University in 2016-2018, and she began a tenure-track position at the University of Southern California in Fall 2018.

 

Luther College (2015-16)
Yang Wang (Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2015)

Yang Wang is an art historian of Asian art with a focus on modern and contemporary Chinese art. She earned a B.A. in Art History and a B.F.A. in Art from the University of Missouri, and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History at The Ohio State University. Her dissertation, “Regionalizing National Art in Maoist China: The Chang’an School of Ink Painting, 1942–1976,” examines the role of China’s provincial art centers in the overhaul of the national art program during the early People’s Republic of China. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE, The American Oriental Society and P.E.O. International. At Luther College she will teach Introduction to Asian Art, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art, and Global Contemporary Art. She will also curate an exhibition featuring contemporary Chinese art at the college.

 

 

Dr. Yang Wang started a tenure-track position as assistant professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver in 2016.

 

Marietta College (2015-16)
Phillip Guingona (Ph.D., University at Buffalo, 2015)

Phillip Guingona is a historian who researches the many avenues of contact between China and the Philippines. He completed his PhD at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2015. His dissertation, entitled “Crafted Links and Accidental Connections of Empire: A History of Early Twentieth Century Sino-Philippine Interaction,” explores Filipino communities in China, Chinese communities in the Philippines, educational and business exchanges, and other types of interaction in what was an intimately connected and malleable region. His research was funded by the Lockwood Plesur Dissertation Travel Award, the Nila T. Gnamm Research Fund, and the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute Advanced PhD Fellowship, and he has taught a variety of History and English courses at Chenggong University in China and the University at Buffalo in upstate New York, where he received an Excellence in Teaching Award. Phillip is looking forward to meeting new students, teaching new courses, and working with new colleagues this academic year in beautiful Marietta, Ohio.

 

 

Dr. Phillip Guingona is Assistant Professor of History at Wells College in Aurora, NY.

 

Berea College (2014-15)
Lauren McKee (Ph.D., Old Dominion University, 2014)

 

 

Lauren McKee is an International Relations scholar specializing in energy security issues in the East Asian region. Her dissertation examines nuclear energy policies in the United States, Germany and Japan. Lauren holds degrees in Asian Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi and she has taught literature and writing courses at the University of New Orleans. She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, in 2009 and 2014 where she offered courses on Japanese literature, history and politics. Her work has been published in the Journal of Energy Security and the Journal of International Women’s Studies and has also received a Best Paper award from the Virginia Social Science Association. Lauren has received funding for her research from the American Association of University Women. At Berea College, Lauren will teach courses on US-Japan Foreign Policy, East Asian Energy and Environmental Security, and International Political Economy.Following her teaching fellowship, Dr. McKee has continued at Berea College as Assistant Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies.

 

Hendrix College (2014-15)
Sarah G. Grant (Ph.D., University of California – Riverside, 2014)

 

 

Sarah G. Grant is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on commodities, bureaucratic regulation, and material/visual culture in Southeast Asia. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, her M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “On Culprits and Crisis: Branding Vietnam in the Global Coffee Industry,” offers an ethnography of the Vietnamese coffee industry, framed as a transnational site of knowledge production constituted through risk, uncertainty, and value. She takes certification schemes, quality control, and auditing procedures as key sites of ethnographic engagement to explicate how, in the wake of the 2001-02 coffee crisis and as global coffee producers move beyond it, Vietnamese farmers and traders directly engage with the economic logic and language of crisis. Her research has been supported by the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program and the Fulbright Institute for International Education. At Hendrix, Dr. Grant will teach an introductory course on Southeast Asian cultures and advanced courses in anthropological perspectives on visual culture and gender in Southeast Asia.In Fall 2015, Dr. Grant began a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University – Fullerton.

 

Hope College (2014-15)
Kai Tang (Ph.D., Harvard University, expected 2014)

 

 

Kai Tang is an ethnomusicologist specializing in traditional and contemporary musics of China and Japan. She completed her PhD at Harvard in 2014, with a dissertation titled “The Musical Culture of Chinese Floaters,” which explores how this mobile community of domestic, temporary, rural-to-urban migrants absorbs various musical elements, traditional or modern, “hometown” or “local”, rural or urban, mainstream or grass-roots, to create their own musical culture carrying profound social meanings. Tang holds a bachelor’s degree in musicology from Harbin Normal University in Heilongjiang, China, and a master’s in musicology from Central Conservatory in Beijing.

 

Muhlenberg College (2014-15)
Arnab Banerji (Ph.D., University of Georgia, expected 2014)

 

 

Arnab Banerji specializes in contemporary Indian theatre and scenographic performance research. Arnab earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata before moving to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Georgia. His dissertation, entitled “Setting the Stage: A Materialist Semiotic Analysis of contemporary Bengali theatre from Kolkata, India,” is a study of selected performance examples from contemporary theatre companies in Kolkata using materialist semiotics performance analysis. Arnab has presented his research on postcolonial performance, ritual Asian performance, Indian cinema and Indian popular culture at various national and international conferences. He has taught theatre and English literature in both India and the United States, including a recent course entitled Appreciation of Theatre at the University of Georgia. Along with academics, Arnab has also been an active theatre practitioner having directed, designed lights, dramaturged and acted for professional, student-led, University Theatre and amateur productions in both India and the United States. He will defend his doctoral dissertation in late June. At Muhlenberg, Arnab will be teaching Introduction to Asian Performance and courses in modern Indian theatre and film.In Fall 2015, Dr. Banerji started a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Theater History, Criticism and Dramaturgy at Loyala Marymount University.

 

Carthage College (2013-14)
Hilary Snow (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2010)

 

 

Dr. Hilary Snow specializes in early modern Japanese art. She earned a B.A. in social anthropology and art history from Harvard University, and she holds an MA in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University. Her dissertation, entitled “Ema: Display Practices of Edo Period Votive Painting,” examines how paintings donated in religious contexts functioned as objects of display within early modern Japan’s culture of public entertainment. Dr. Snow has been a Visiting Researcher at Keio University, supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. She held the Carol Bates Curatorial Fellowship at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and has taught at institutions such as The Johns Hopkins University and Saint Joseph’s University. Dr. Snow’s ongoing research explores early modern patronage and the mingling of sacred and secular practices at Japanese religious intuitions.At Carthage College, Dr. Snow will teach Masterpieces of Asian Art and two collaborative, interdisciplinary courses as part of the Carthage Symposium program.In Fall 2015, Dr. Hilary Snow began serving as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Honors College and at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

 

Wittenberg University (2013-14)
Jooyeon Rhee (Ph.D., York University, Toronto, Canada, 2011)

 

 

Jooyeon Rhee received her PhD from the Department of Humanities at York University in Canada in 2011. Her Ph.D dissertation, Between Words and Images: Gender and Cultural Productions in Colonial Korea, examines ways in which women are represented in popular cultural productions such as newspaper serial fictions, silent films, women’s magazines and photographs in colonial Korea between the mid-1900s and the late 1920s. She has been affiliated with Asian Institute at University of Toronto as a Visiting Scholar following her doctoral studies. She taught Korean History at University of Toronto, Korean language and pre-modern East Asian Culture and Society at York University. As an extension of her doctoral research, she is currently exploring the relationship between gender and literature by examining Korean translations of Japanese novels appeared in a colonial newspaper, The Daily (Maeil sinbo), between 1912 and 1917. Dr. Rhee is a recipient of Korea Foundation and the Northeast Asia Council Short-term Research Travel Grant (2012), Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2006-2009), Ontario International Education Opportunity Scholarships (2008), and Albert Chan Scholarship (2005), which have generously supported her research.At Wittenberg, Dr. Rhee will be teaching Introduction to Social and Cultural History of Modern Korea, and courses in Modern Korean Literature and Film.In Fall 2014, Dr. Rhee began a position as Lecturer in East Asian Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Haverford College (2012-13)
Erin Schoneveld (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2012)

 

 

Dr. Erin Schoneveld is an East Asian art historian with a focus modern Japanese cinema, visual culture, and narrative media. She received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Confronting Modernity: Shirakaba Magazine and the Japanese Avant-garde” examines how the avant-garde pursuit of individuality during early twentieth century Japan constituted a confrontation over state-sponsored modernism and how these confrontations played out among emerging technologies like print media and photography. Dr. Schoneveld’s research has received support from the Japan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Research Fellowship. At Haverford Dr. Schoneveld will teach an introductory course on Japanese Art and Civilization, an upper level course on modern Japanese literature and film, and a curatorial seminar that examines the ways in which technological shifts and cultural transformations have shaped East Asian artistic production and visual consumption within modern and contemporary exhibition practices.Dr. Erin Schoneveld stayed at Haverford College first as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Art and Visual Culture. In 2014, she began a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

 

Davidson College (2011-12)
Laura Kaehler Elder (Ph.D., University Center of the City University of New York, 2009)

 

 

Laura Kaehler Elder received her PhD from the Anthropology Department at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in 2009. Her specialties, developed through fieldwork in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, are global political economy and cosmopolitanism. She is currently at work on a book entitled The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Malaysia, Inc. versus the Markets. This book, based on dissertation research funded by Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright IIE and Wenner-Gren Foundation grants, is an ethnographic investigation of the restructuring of the Malaysian capital market in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, showing how the calculative practices of financial experts intersect with the global financial regime, reformatting relations between subjects so as to create a forceful, indeed compelling scale of value.Dr. Laura Elder is in a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Global Studies at St. Mary’s College.

 

Gettysburg College (2011-12)
Susan Chen (Ph.D., Emory University, 2009)

 

 

Dr. Susan Chen is a cultural anthropologist whose subfields of study encompass Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, and Film and Visual Studies. While holding one M.A. degree in Chinese History and another in South Asian Studies, Dr. Chen earned her interdisciplinary doctoral degree from Emory University in 2009. Entitled Living with “Tibet”: The Local, the Translocal, and the Cultural Geography of Dharamsala, her dissertation examines the life worlds and social networks of Tibetans that contemporarily stretch between India, China and beyond. As a native of Taiwan, Dr. Chen is also a trained and experienced instructor in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and she has studied Hindi and modern oral Tibetan for her research purposes. Following her doctoral studies, Dr. Chen worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for the Diaspora Studies project sponsored by the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. At Gettysburg, she will teach one language course on business Chinese, an introductory course on contemporary Chinese popular culture and society, and a seminar on the anthropology and history of Tibet.Following her teaching fellowship, Dr. Chen served Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese at Skidmore College and Earlham College.

 

University of Wisconsin – Whitewater (2011-12)
Mary Alyson Prude (Ph.D., University of California Santa Barbara, expected 2011)

 

 

Mary Alyson Prude, PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara with a dual emphasis in South Asian Religions and Buddhist Studies, will be the 2011-12 Luce Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. Her dissertation is titled, “Difference, Gender, and Extraordinary Knowing: A study of Himalayan revenants.” The dissertation is a study of lay Buddhist women in Nepal who have undergone near-death experiences, and who later assumed important positions in their local communities. Her master’s degree from UC Santa Barbara was a study on celibate women and Buddhist nunneries in Nepal. She is fluent in Nepali, Chinese and Tibetan. Ms. Prude received numerous awards including Fulbright-Hay dissertation fellowship to support nine-months of field research in Nepal and Tibet, the Comstock Award and the Rowny Fellowship for her research in religious studies, and a Jacob Javits Fellowship.After her postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Prude stayed at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. In 2015 she began a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Religion in Georgia Southern University.

 

Washington and Jefferson College (2011-12)
Dewen Zhang (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, expected 2011)

 

 

Dewen Zhang studied history at State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her dissertation explores the precarious relationship between Chinese women and World War II, 1937-45 (known in China as the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance). Her work focuses on the history of military nursing, war and gender relations, and women’s movements of twentieth century China. Her research has been funded by aids from the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Department of History at Stony Brook University. She holds a M.A. in history from University of Maryland at Baltimore County and a B.A. in history from Fudan University. Before coming to Washington and Jefferson College, Dewen Zhang has been teaching at department of history and gender and women studies program at SUNY Stony Brook University and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania. She has also worked for the United Nations in New York City. During her stay at Washington & Jefferson College, Dewen Zhang will teach courses on women in East Asia, war and East Asian society, and general themes on gender and women’s studies; and co-teach a course “Asian Heritage.”Dr. Zhang is in a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of History at Randolph-Macon College.

 

Dickinson College (2010-11)
Sheri Lullo (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 2009)

 

 

Dr. Sheri Lullo was recently appointed as Dickinson’s ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Art and Art History for 2010-2011. Dr. Lullo earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in the History of Art and Architecture in 2009. Her dissertation, “Toiletry Case Sets Across Life and Death in Early China (5th c. BCE – 3rd c. CE),” was advised by Prof. Katheryn Linduff. She also earned her M.A. in History of Art and Architecture from Pittsburgh, and earned her B.A with a major in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1999. A near-native speaker of Chinese, Lullo received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2000-2001 to support her research in China. She worked on an archaeological excavation in China and later as a researcher at the archaeological field office for the Antiquities and Monuments Office in Hong Kong. She also served as an editorial assistant, and was member of a team testing virtual reality tour programs for historic shrines in China.In Fall 2010, Dr. Lullo will be teaching Introduction to the Arts of Asia. In this course students will be introduced to the visual culture of Asia by focusing on works of art and material culture from India, China, Korea, Japan and areas of the Islamic world from the 3d millennium B.C.E. through the 19th century.Dr. Lullo is in a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Union College.

 

Fairfield University (2010-11)
Ive Aaslid Covaci (Ph.D., Yale University, 2007)

 

 

Dr. Ive Aaslid Covaci studied Art History at Stanford University, receiving her B.A. in Art History with distinction and her M.A. in East Asian Studies with a concentration on Japanese Art History. For her Masters thesis, she wrote “The Construction of Memory in the Honen Shonin eden.” During her final year of study for the Stanford M.A. she studied advanced Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Subsequently, she received two more Masters degrees at Yale University, a Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy, both in History of Art. She received her Ph.D. in History of Art also from Yale University. Her dissertation was “The Ishiyamadera engi and the Representation of Dreams and Visions in Pre-modern Japanese Art.” Her primary advisor at Yale was Mimi Yiengpruksawan. Following her Ph.D. studies, Dr. Covaci won a prestigious research fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in London, where she was a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow. She worked there on revising her dissertation into a book manuscript titled “Dreaming Images: Picturing Visions in Pre-modern Japan.” During her year as an ASIANetwork-Luce Teaching Fellow at Fairfield University, she will be teaching Introduction to Art History: Asia, Africa, & the Americas, The Arts of India, China, & Japan, and a Special Topics Seminar on Japanese Buddhist Scroll Art.Following her fellowship year, Dr. Covaci has continuted at Fairfield University as adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History. She was also a Guest Curator at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2016.

 

Hobart and William Smith Colleges (2010-11)
Elana Chipman (Ph.D., Cornell University, 2007)

Dr. Elana Chipman (Ph.D., Cornell, 2007) is a socio-cultural anthropologist who has done fieldwork in Southeastern China and in Taiwan and studies local identity and the nation-state, ritual and popular religion, tourism, and political-ecology. Her dissertation work examines the production of locality in Taiwan through ritual and other forms of culture work, such as grass-roots historiography. Her new project looks at the ways that changing global environmental discourses are transforming contemporary ritual practices in Chinese cultures, primarily the burning of offerings. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the East Asian Studies Center at Ohio State University. Most recently she was a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. Dr. Chipman co-taught a general introductory course East Asian studies course and an anthropology course on environment and culture, and taught her own course on the anthropology of tourism in East Asia.

Randolph-Macon College (2010-11)
Charles A. Andrews (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2008)

 

 

Dr. Charles A. Andrews will be the 2010-11 ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Randolph-Macon College. Dr. Andrews is a 2008 graduate of the University of Indiana with a Ph.D. in Japanese and specialization in Japanese History. He has been teaching part-time at DePauw University since 2003 and he has lived in Japan on several occasions as a high school English teacher (1988-90) and as a research fellow at Tenri (1994-96) and Senshu (2002) Universities. His research interest is communications in Tokugawa and Early Meiji Japan. While at Randolph-Macon he will teach Intermediate Japanese Language, the Culture of Japan, and Japanese History. Randolph-Macon is an independent co-educational, liberal arts college of 1250 students in historically rich Central Virginia. The Asian Studies program recently was expanded from a minor to a major. With the support of an ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Fellowship, the presence of Charles Andrews on our campus will strengthen our offerings and bring fresh perspectives to our students and faculty.For two years after his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Charles Andrew was a visiting Assistant Professor of History at Transylvania University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Southern New Hampshire University.

 

The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc. Among the Foundation’s many grant-making initiatives are those that support increased understanding between the United States and Asia.