Faculty Notes (2000)

Victoria Cass, Associate Professor of Chinese, published Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming (Rowman and Littlefield). She gave presentations on the work to bookstores in Cambridge, MA, Winchester, MA, Denver, Chicago, Reno, San Francisco Berkeley, Menlo Park, and Sonoma between December and March and at Washington College and the University of Nevada in March, and she was interviewed on KGNU FM in Boulder in April. She participated in a panel discussion on women in Asia on NPR's West Coast Live in San Francisco on April 15. She published "Feng Menglong and the Articulation of Sentiment" in Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, ed. Hua Yuen-Li Mowry, and presented a lecture on "Elite and Popular Culture in Traditional China" at a Social Science Education Consortium workshop for Teaching East Asia.

Howard Goldblatt, Professor of Chinese, co-translated Chu-T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man (with Sylvia Li-chun Lin, Columbia UP), which was chosen as one of the New York Times's "Notable Books of 1999" and a "Best Book of 1999" by the Los Angeles Times. His translation of The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan was published in April by Arcade. Prof. Goldblatt's translation of two stories appeared in separate issues of the U.S. journal Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series; his co-translation (with Haili Kong, Ph.D., CU) of Ba Jin's Ward Four was published by China Books & Periodicals; "Why I Hate Arthur Waley" was published in Translation Quarterly (Hong Kong). His article "Border Crossings" was published in China Beyond the Headlines (Rowman and Littlefield), and "Jin luan" (Forbidden Food) was published by China Times Publishers (Taipei). In October Prof. Goldblatt presented the keynote address, "Of Silk Purses and Sows' Ears," at the annual meeting of the American Literary Translators Association in New York. In summer he was a Visiting Professor at Hong Kong's City University.

John Pavel Kehlen, Instructor of Japanese, published an article on the aesthetics of Aristotle and Zeami in Poietika. He was a Pharos Foundation grant recipient for further study of comparative classics and attended their conference in New York, where he gave a paper on methods of teaching classical languages/literatures. He is preparing a manuscript on the Tale of Genji and rhythmopoetics, a study of how the rhythms of prose compositions interact with the novel's structure and meaning. He will be attending a conference this August in Delphi, Greece, where he will be assisting in a workshop on interactions between Western and Asian drama and performing in an original-language production of Antigone.

Terry Kleeman, Associate Professor of Chinese, delivered the papers "Clan, State. Culture, or Ethnicity: The Meanings of Ba in Ancient Southwestern China" at Stanford University and "Ethnonyms and Ethnic Groups in Ancient Sichuan" at Cambridge University. He will also give a paper in Hong Kong at a conference titled: "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture" at the end of May. He is co-chair of the Chinese Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion and co-editor of the journal Studies in Central and East Asian Religions.

Paul W. Kroll, Professor of Chinese, published two articles this year: "The Light of Heaven in Medieval Taoist Verse" in Journal of Chinese Religions and "Tamed Kite and Stranded Fish: Interference and Apology in Lu Chao-lin's fu" in T'ang Studies. In October he delivered an invited paper at the First International Conference on the Teaching of Classical Chinese, held at Columbia University. He will be on research leave during the coming academic year, having been awarded a Faculty Fellowship from CU and also a Senior Scholars Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Prof. Kroll has recently been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the quartelry Journal of the American Oriental Society, to combine with the position of JAOS East Asia Editor which he has held for sixteen years. He continues as editor of the annual journal T'ang Studies and is now in the first year of a two-year term as president of the Oriental Society's Western Branch.

Stephen D. Miller, Assistant Professor of Japanese, has written "The (Temporary?) Queering of Japanese TV," an article about a 1993 "renzoku dorama" (a dramatic series) entitled "Doosookai," to appear in the Journal of Homosexuality in 2000 in a special issue devoted to Gay Asian Cinema; the article will later appear in a book to be published by Haworth Press. He organized the Midwest Association of Japanese Literary Studies (MAJLS) conference in November in Boulder.

Misae Nishikura, Senior Instructor of Japanese, attended the "Conference on Language, Communication & Global Management" in Scottsdale, Arizona, in April. She received grants from Japan Foundation and CU-Outreach Committee for and organized the annual Japanese Speech Contest held in March (see article in this Newsletter); she also organized Japanese language/culture lessons as part of the foreign language outreach program in Montrose and Buena Vista, Colorado.

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Professor of Japanese, published "The Spirituality of Nichiren" in Buddhist Spirituality, ed. Ewert Cousins (Crossroad) and "Yosano Akiko and Nationalism" in Modern Japan, ed. James L. Huffman (Garland Press). She was selected Phi Beta Kappa Campus Scholar, and was awarded the Boulder Faculty Assembly Service Award. She is President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese and serves on numerous national boards and committees.

Kyoko Saegusa, Senior Instructor of Japanese, participated in a panel discussion, "How Best to Teach Chinese Characters in the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Classroom," at the Arizona Language Association annual conference in September. She published the Instructor's Manual for Yookoso! Vols. I & II, co-authored with Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku (McGraw-Hill). With grants from the U.S.-Japan Foundation and MLA, she coordinated activities on high school and college Japanese program articulation, and she coordinated Japan Day 2000 on campus in March.

Stephen B. Snyder, Associate Professor of Japanese, published Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, co-edited with Philip Gabriel (University of Hawaii Press); On Parole, a translation of a novel byYoshimura Akira (Harcourt); and "Extreme Imagination: The Fiction of Murakami Ryu," in Oe and Beyond. He has received funding to go to Japan this summer to work on a book manuscript: "Half-World Fictions: The Demimonde in Modern Japanese Literature." He is serving on the Board of Executives of the Japan-America Society of Colorado and on the Board of the Center for Asian Studies, as well as directing the Asian Studies Program. He is helping organize an international conference in the fall on Japanese Women Filmmakers. In March he organized a panel for AAS conference in San Diego on "Obsesssion in Popular Culture."

Madeline K. Spring, Associate Professor of Chinese, published "Improving Reading Instruction in Upper-level Chinese Courses: Challenges and Possibilities" in Mapping the Course of the Chinese Language Field. She gave presentations at the International Conference on Chinese Language Teaching and Learning at Columbia University and the national meeting of the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign Language Programs (AAUSC) in Dallas in November. She was a joint recipient of an ATLAS technology grant to develop website and multi-media course materials for a course on Chinese film. She was elected to the board of directors of the T'ang Studies Society. In November she was co-leader, with Irene Liu of Columbia, of the CLTA Preconference Pedagogy Workshop, and she was invited to teach a week-long session at the Summer Institute for the Training of Chinese Teachers in Wisconsin.

Kumiko Takahara, Associate Professor of Japanese, presented "Foreign Loans in Social Communication--Facilitator or Inhibitor" at the 7th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication at the University of Louisville in July and "Observation on Core Curriculum" at the Symposium on the Current AO College Entrance Exam and its Future, hosted by the Ministry of Education in Tokyo. Her book The Denver Post and the Japanese American Internment in Colorado will appear in Fall 2001.

Faye Yuan Kleeman, Assistant Professor of Chinese, presented the paper "Mysticism and Corporeality: Re-envisioning Manchuria in a Postcolonial Japan" at the International Conference of Contemporary Japanese Popular and Mass Culture, Montreal and also a paper at the Annual Conference of Association of Japanese Literary Studies in Boulder. She has received the NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, "Women and Empire: An Alternate View of the Japanese Colonial Experience," a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Research Grant, "Identity, Textuality, and Colonialism: Taiwanese Literature under the Japanese Occupation (1895-1945)," a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship, "Women and Empire: An Alternate View of the Japanese Colonial Experience," and a Japanese Foundation Research Grant, "Narrating the Empire: The Colonial Enterprise and Modern Japanese Literature." She is currently at Tokyo University until September on the Japan Foundation grant.

Minglang Zhou, Assistant Professor of Chinese, published "Teachers' Role in Second Language Classrooms," Journal of Chinese Teaching in the World; "The Official National Language and Language Attitudes of Three Ethnic Minority Groups in China," Language Problems and Language Planning; "Attitudes of Cantonese and Xiang speakers toward Mandarin and its Stereotyped Speakers," Texas Linguistic Forum; "Metalinguistic Awareness in Linguistic Relativity," Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, ed. Puetz and Verspoor (John Benjamins). He received grants for research on language policy in China and fieldwork on language policy implementation in Tibet and Yunnan.