Faculty Notes (2002)

Victoria B. Cass, Associate Professor of Chinese, is completing a commissioned manuscript on Chinese mythology with emphasis on myths of the feminine in popular sources, and also a chapter to appear in the catalogue for an exhibit in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne, of paintings of women in Late Imperial China. A chapter on "History and Culture of the Ming: An Overview," will appear in Ming China, Political Stability and Cultural Expansion. A Humanities Approach to Chinese History, published by the Social Science Education Consortium. The Journal of Asian Studies published her review of H.D. Hundley's Maxine Hong Kingston. For a workshop on Teaching East Asia she presented a lecture on "Ming Cities: Power, Pleasure and Money."

Fang-yi Chao, Instructor of Chinese, taught first-, second- and fourth-year Chinese and co-taught, with Senior Instructor Kyoko Saegusa, a graduate course entitled "Methods of Teaching Asian Languages." She presented a paper entitled "Shilun tong, jiang, dang, zeng, geng she zhong Qieyun yunlei de yinwei" [On the Qieyun's rhymes in the tong, jiang, dang, zeng, and geng rhyme categories] at the 34th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics in Kunming, China from October 24-27. To promote Chinese language learning and provide opportunities for students to practice their language skills, she coordinated, with Instructor Minori Murata, the annual Chinese-Japanese speech contest, the Chinese New Year party, and the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival and supervised the Chinese Club, which has been very active this year.

Faye Yuan Kleeman, Assistant Professor of Japanese, is this year's recipient of the prestigious Kayden Faculty Manuscript Award, which provides a subvention given to the best original book-length work of scholarship written by a regular member of the CU faculty. She has also received several grants from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and the Graduate Council on Arts and Humanities to pursue research in Asia and a Freeman Grant to develop a new course on gender, historiography, and colonialism in Asian film. She also presented papers at the annual meetings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies and North American Taiwanese Scholars Association, at a conference on Taiwanese Colonial literature sponsored by Columbia University, and gave invited lectures at Columbia and City College of New York.

Terry Kleeman, Associate Professor of Chinese and Religious Studies, in addition to planning and chairing an international conference on Chinese religions, presided over one major conference panel and acted as discussant for another. He finished his term as co-chair of the Chinese Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion but remains active in a variety of scholarly organizations. On campus, he is involved in planning and technology issues through his roles as chair of the Arts and Sciences Council Planning Committee, member of the Information Technology Council, and member of the Boulder Campus Planning Commission. He also serves as managing editor of the journal Studies in Central and East Asian Religions.

Paul W. Kroll, Professor of Chinese, published this year a lengthy chapter on "Poetry of the T'ang Dynasty" in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press) and an article on "The Significance of the in the History of T'ang Poetry" in the most recent issue of the journal T'ang Studies, as well as reviews in various journals. His book on the Buddhist writings of Li Po (701-762) will appear this summer. Due out later this year is a co-edited volume on early medieval Chinese literature and cultural history. Last October he delivered the presidential address ("On Knowing Heaven's Decree") at the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the American Oriental Society's Western Branch. Recently he presented lectures and seminars at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. In May he will give a special lecture at the Collège de France (Paris), to be followed later in the month by a series of lectures at Heidelberg University. During this academic year he presented papers at the national meeting of the American Oriental Society, at an international conference on T'ang-dynasty culture, and at an international conference on comparative court culture. He continues to serve as editor-in-chief of the quarterly Journal of the American Oriental Society and editor of the annual journal T'ang Studies.

Stephen Miller, Assistant Professor of Japanese, received a $4000 grant through the auspices of the Center for Asian Studies and the Freeman Foundation to created a course tentatively titled "Homosexualities in Japan." The course will be taught in the spring of 2003. He also spearheaded a discussion among scholars on the national level to investigate better pedagogical methods of teaching classical Japanese. This culminated in a roundtable panel at the Association of Asian Studies conference in Washington D.C. this past April entitled "Inter-disciplinary Issues in Teaching Pre-modern Japanese: Texts, Languages, Metalanguages." Also, in conjunction with the modern Japanese language instructors he created a prototype for a component to the language program that would introduce translation at each level of the students' instruction. This was tested last summer and introduced formally during this academic year. So far it has been met with great success from the students.

Minori Murata, Instructor of Japanese, taught the intensive beginning Japanese courses last summer, first-year Japanese in the fall and spring semesters and third-year Japanese conversation and composition class in spring, in addition to the introductory-level Japanese course in Continuing Education. She also supervised three first-year TAs in the fall and two in the spring and organized the Japanese Speech Contest that took place in November.

Lynn Parisi, Director, Program for Teaching East Asia, co-authored "Recreating a Modern Nation: Japan 1945-1989," part IV of "A Humanities Approach to Japanese History" (Boulder CO: Social Science Education Consortium, 2002).

Pori Park, Instructor of Korean, presented a paper, "A Korean Buddhist Response to Modernity: Han Yongun's Doctrinal Reinterpretation for His Reformist Thought," at the Conference of the American Academy of Religion in Denver from November 17-20. Her paper "Japanese Buddhist Activities in Korea" has been accepted for presentation at the next AAR conference in Toronto in November 2002. She received a four-month research grant from the Korea Foundation and will be in Korea this summer studying Korean Buddhism after liberation. She arranged for a Korean chorus and dance group to participate in CAS's "Asia Day" on March 16 and gave presentations on Korean culture in several area schools and CU classes.

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Professor of Japanese, delivered two keynote addresses: "Alliance and Articulation: Japanese Language Education in the Unitd States," for the Japan Studies Association of Australia 2001 Biennial Conference in Sydney, Australia, in June 30, and "'Moving and Without Strength': Is There a Woman's Voice in Waka?" at the conference on Reading and Writing Japanese Women's Texts at the University of Alberta in August. She gave a talk on "Ahead of His Time" at the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in December 29. She continues as President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese.

Kyoko Saegusa, Senior Instructor of Japanese, received an FTEP Technology in Teaching and Language grant and, from the CCFLT, the Ronald W. Walker Memorial Grant. Both grants are to be used to develop an interactive, self-directed Kanji learning program for basic-level students of Japanese. Graduate students Hideko Shimizu and Nathan Bak are working with her on the program. She sponsored a Kanji/vocabulary computer game creation by the Educational Technology House program (Audrey Vernon, developer), funded by FTEP. Eric Sherrill worked with her on this program. She continues her work on the renovation of the four-year Japanese language curriculum and has been awarded a course buyout from the Freeman grant to write the basic-level (first- and second-year) Japanese curriculum. Hideko Shimizu has been awarded a course buyout to develop a new third-year curriculum. She presented two origami workshops at CAS's Asia Day.

Hideko Shimizu, Senior Instructor of Japanese, published the article "Japanese Language Educators' Strategies for and Attitudes Toward Teaching kanji" in the Modern Language Journal. She presented the paper "Facing Real Problems in Virtual Communities" at the Creating Virtual Language Learning Communities annual conference at the University of California at Davis. In March she gave a presentation with Professor Yoko Koike at Haverford University on facilitating learning in cyberspace. She demonstrated several styles of the Japanese flower arrangements of Sogetsu Ryu at the Colorado Congress of Foreign Language Teachers.

Stephen B. Snyder, Associate Professor of Japanese, served this year as interim chair of EALC and as director of the Center for Asian Studies. His translation of Yu Miri's novel Gold Rush was published by Welcome Rain in March. He has received a Fulbright research fellowship for AY 2002-2003 to study the effects of translation and globalization on contemporary Japanese fiction and will be moving to Tokyo in August.

Madeline K. Spring, Associate Professor of Chinese, on sabbatical this year, went to China to do an on-site evaluation of the CIEE Beijing program and also visit the programs in Shanghai and Nanjing. She has been completing her book Making Connections:  Enhance Your Listening Comprehension in Chinese, which will be published by Cheng and Tsui in August 2002. In addition she is working on a study of some prose writings of Liu Yuxi (772-842).