Faculty Notes (2003)

Victoria B. Cass, Associate Professor of Chinese, was interviewed for Canadian Public Broadcasting for a radio documentary that aired in March out of Toronto, on Chinese Women of Shanghai in the Republican Period in China. She published a review in the Journal of Asian Studies and is now finishing a book entitled Where the Gods Visit: Myths of China, part of a series published by Sterling Press. She also presented at a day-long workshop in Denver, sponsored by Teaching East Asia, on "Urban culture and urban values—late Imperial China."

Fang-yi Chao, Assistant Professor of Chinese, attended the following conferences and presented these papers: "On the Phonetic Representations of Southern Min Dialect in Taiwan," First International Conference on the Written Representation of Chinese Dialects, Hong Kong, June 21-22, 2002; "What to Expect the First Year: The Most Common Errors in First-year Chinese," 2002 International Conference on Theory and Practice in Teaching Chinese-New Perspectives in the New Millennium, Hong Kong, June 25-26, 2002; "When Linguistics Meets Pedagogy: How to Teach Chinese Characters More Effectively," Annual Meeting of Chinese Language Teachers Association, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 21-24, 2002. To promote Chinese language learning and to provide opportunities for students to practice their language skills, she also coordinated several activities, which included the third EALC Chinese-Japanese speech contest, Chinese Spring Festival party, and ALTEC China and Taiwan programs.

Faye Yuan Kleeman was promoted, with tenure, to Associate Professor this year. In February, she was invited to give a talk at the Modern Japan Seminar at Columbia University; in March she was invited back for an international conference on Colonial literature and culture in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation. She also gave a lecture on comic art and history to the students at the City University of New York. In 2002, Faye was awarded an Association of Asian Studies North East Asian Council Travel Grant, a CGAH Research Grant, and a Freeman Foundation Grant for Curriculum Development, which funded her research to Asia. In Japan, she presented her research at the Japanese Association for Taiwanese Studies Fourth Annual Conference in Nagoya and held a workshop on gender and Japanese colonial literature for the Institute of Humanities at the Ritusmeikan University in Kyoto. In Taiwan, she gave a lecture on Modernism in an East Asian context at National Chengchi University. She was also chosen as a research fellow for the Center for Humanities and Arts and participated in a year-long seminar on "Body, Voice, and Performance." Prof. Kleeman published one refereed article and 5 non-refereed articles and translated three articles from Chinese and Japanese into English. Her book on Japanese colonial literature, Under an Imperial Sun, will be published by the University of Hawaii Press this fall. She also concluded her tenure as President of the Colorado Japanese Language Education Association, organizing two bi-annual assemblies for the Association which took place at CU-Boulder in October and April.

Terry Kleeman, Associate Professor of Chinese and Religious Studies, received a Freeman grant last summer to travel to Asia to develop a new course on East Asian new religions. He visited many sacred sites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Japan, talked to several divinities (both in human and less corporeal forms), and came back to teach the course in the Fall. Prof. Kleeman is currently in his first year as President of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions. He presented a paper at the conference commemorating the retirement of Daniel Overmyer, held at the University of British Columbia, was discussant for a panel at the American Academy of Religion, and presided at a panel at the Association for Asian Studies. He also published an article on "Ethnic Identity and Daoist Identity in Traditional China" in Daoist Identity: History, Lineage and Ritual (Honolulu, 2002).

Paul W. Kroll, Professor of Chinese, published this year a book titled Dharma Bell and Dhāranī Pillar: Li Po's Buddhist Inscriptions, focusing on some of the epigraphic writings of the famous eighth-century poet, Li Po. He also published an article, "Reflections on Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation," in the Journal of Asian Studies, as well as reviews in various journals. Most recently a Festschrift he co-edited with David R. Knechtges has appeared. This is titled Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History, In Honor of Richard B. Mather and Donald Holzman and it includes his article, "The Divine Songs of the Lady of Purple Tenuity," on the fourth-century poems attributed to the Taoist goddess Tzu-wei fu-jen. Professor Kroll lectured last May at the Collège de France and gave a week-long series of talks on medieval poetry at the University of Heidelberg. In October he lectured and led a seminar at Cornell University. In November he gave a lecture and a week-long mini-course at the University of Washington. And in February he delivered a lecture at Cambridge University. He also presented papers at the national meeting of the American Oriental Society (on rhyme and meter in Li Po’s poetry) as well as at the A.O.S. Western Branch meeting (on medieval Taoist prescriptions for somatic and psychological health). He continues as editor-in-chief of the quarterly Journal of the American Oriental Society and editor of the annual journal T’ang Studies.

Cheol Lee, Instructor of Korean and doctoral candidate in linguistics, was in charge of EALC’s Korean program and assisted with the Speech Contest in April.

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

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Professor of Japanese, continued to be active in professional leadership: She completed her seventh year as President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese and will serve as Past President in 2003-04. She is also Vice President of the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages, and she served on the foreign language task force of the National Association for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. She is project director or co-project director on ten different grants awarded to the Association of Teachers of Japanese or the University of Colorado. During the summer of 2002 she taught a study abroad course on the haiku poet Matsuo Basho: She and nineteen CU students retraced Basho's 1869 poetic pilgrimage through northern Honshu; visiting the sites that inspired Basho's prose and poetry, studying Edo period cultural, religious, and literary history; meeting with contemporary poets; and studying and composing the genres of haiku and haibun. Recent research publications and presentations include "‘Full of Sentiment but Weak’: Is There a Woman’s Voice in Waka?" in Reading and Writing Japanese Women’s Texts edited by Janice Brown and Sonja Arntzen (University of Alberta, 2002), "Japanese Poetry and the Pedagogy of Literature" (Modern Language Association), and "The Aesthetics of ‘Modanizumu’ in the Poetry of Yosano Akiko" (Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association).

Kyoko Saegusa, Senior Instructor of Japanese, co-presented an accreditation examination workshop at the American Translators Association annual conference, November, 2002, conducted an all-day workshop on the Silent Way at SWCOLT/CCFLT in Aurora in March, completed a template for a self-directed interactive Kanji program with Hideko Shimizu and Nathan Bak (funds came from FTEP and CCFLT), and conducted three origami workshops.

Hideko Shimizu, Senior Instructor of Japanese, presented a paper on curriculum design and tecnology at CALICO at UC, Davis in March and published an article with Dr. Kathy Green on Japanese language educators attitudes toward kanji in the Modern Language Journal. She organized two workshops that brought Dr. Yasuhiko Tohsaku, who is the author of Japanese textbook, to CU Boulder. The workshops emphasized curriculum development and assessment for foreign languages. Most recently, she participated in Asia Day for the first time, where she demonstrated Ikebana. Her article on Ikebana appeared in the Daily Camera.

Stephen B. Snyder, Associate Professor of Japanese, is on a year-long Fulbright Research Fellowship working at the University of Tokyo on a project concerning globalization and translation. His translation of a novel by Kirino Natsuo, entitled Out, will be published in August.

Madeline K. Spring, Associate Professor of Chinese, published the book Making Connections: Improve Your Listening Comprehension in Chinese (Boston: Cheng and Ts’ui, 2002, available in both full form and simplified character version. Last summer she conducted research at Fudan University in Shanghai and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. In October she presented a paper about the modern writer Lu Ye at the Western Branch meeting of the American Oriental Society. In December she gave a paper at the national meeting of the Modern Language Association. In February she gave an invited talk, "Fantasies of Morality and Disenchantment: Fateful Women in Honglou meng and Before," at the University of Florida. Prof. Spring is currently directly a project to develop a Computer Adaptive Assessment Program in Chinese, as part of a grant to the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Oregon.