Faculty Notes (1999)

Victoria Cass, Associate Professor of Chinese, has a new book due out this summer, Dangerous Women: Warriors, Geishas and and Grannies of the Ming (Rowan & Littlefield). In April, Professor Cass, together with Stephen Snyder, led two sessions on teaching about Asia in a day-long workshop organized by the Social Science Education Consortium for Colorado high school teachers interested in teaching about China and Japan.

Howard Goldblatt's translation of Hong Ying's autobiography Daughter of Hunger was published in the U.K. (Bloomsbury) in late 1998 and in the U.S. (Grove) in January 1999. His essay "Chinese Literature" appeared in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century; he also authored two entries (Mo Yan and Xiao Hong) for the recently published Encyclopedia of the Novel. His co-translation (with Sylvia Li-chun Lin) of Chu T'ien-wen's prize-winning novel Notes of a Desolate Man, funded by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, was published in April by Columbia UP. Professor Goldblatt will spend the month of May in Hong Kong as visiting professor at The City University. In Hong Kong he will give the keynote address at the 1999 ASAIHL Seminar "Liberal Arts Education and Socio-Economic Development in the Next Century" and will address the Association of Professional Translators. He will give a paper, "Forbidden Food," at a conference on Food and Literature in Taipei in late May, and he has been invited to give the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Literary Translators Association in New York in October.

John Pavel Kehlen was a visiting instructor in the department this year and will be with us next year as well. He is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago on the poetics of Classical Greek and Japanese tragedy. He published an article on "Minase Sangin and the Art of Rhythmopoieia" in Interpoetics and has another on the aesthetics of Aristotle and Zeami in press.

Terry Kleeman is a new addition to the University and holds a joint appointment in EALC and Religious Studies. He comes to us from the College of William and Mary and previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota. He recently published an article on local religion in Northern Sichuan in Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie and presented papers at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Holland, the Rocky Mountain Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the Conference on Religion and Authority in Early China at Harvard, and in a lecture series at Stanford University. Professor Kleeman is co-chair of the Chinese Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion and has been named co-managing editor for the journal Studies in Central and East Asian Religion. This semester he was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

Joyce Wong Kroll presented a paper to the Colorado Congress of Foreign Languages Teachers Association. She is also involved in a project creating computer-based instructional materials centering on the film "Strange Friends."

During the past year Paul W. Kroll, Director of Graduate Studies in Chinese, completed the section on "Poetry of the T'ang Dynasty (shih and fu)" for the forthcoming Columbia History of Traditional Chinese Literature. In addition, he completed an article on "The Light of Heaven in Medieval Taoist Verse," forthcoming in Journal of Chinese Religions, and an article called "Tamed Kite and Stranded Fish: Two fu by Lu Chao-lin," forthcoming in T'ang Studies. He also published several reviews. In October he presented a seminar on "Nostalgia and History in Ninth-century China" at the University of Washington. He also delivered papers at the International Congress of Asian Scholars (Holland), the American Oriental Society's Western Branch meeting, and the national meeting of the American Oriental Society. Among other projects, he is working on a translation of the Ho-yiieh ying-ling chi, a mid-eighth century anthology of Chinese poetry. He continues to be East Asia Editor for the quarterly Journal of the American Oriental Society and Editor of the annual journal T'ang Studies.

Sylvia Li-chun Lin published an article, "Unwelcome Heroines," in the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, a lengthy review in Modern Chinese Literature and another in World Literature Today. She authored two entries (Li Ang and Li Rui) for the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, and one (Pai Hsien-yung) for the Encyclopedia of the Novel. She published a translation of "Men Cry Too" for The Chinese PEN, has had accepted the translation of a critical essay by Li Jui-t'eng for Taiwan Literature, and co-translated Chu T'ien-wen's prize-winning novel Notes of a Desolate Man (with Howard Goldblatt) for Columbia University Press. Her anthology of stories by Li Rui, with a critical introduction, will be published in Hong Kong in the summer, while she is a research associate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This year Dr. Lin taught modern Chinese literature and advanced Mandarin and was responsible for revising the third-year Chinese curriculum to fit the new five-day-a-week schedule.

Stephen Miller, Assistant Professor of Japanese, is in Japan this year, working on a twelfth-century imperial poetry anthology called the "Senzaishu" as well as a manuscript on Japanese Buddhist poetry. He won a Japan Foundation Fellowship to work there with Professor Kubota Jun. He is also organizing, from afar, the upcoming Midwestern Association of Japanese Literary Studies conference, which will
be held on campus next fall.

Misae Nishikura, Senior Instructor, has primarily taught Beginning Japanese I and II this past year. She continues to develop technology-based learning materials. Her goal for the coming year is to create web-based reading tasks for the beginning-level Japanese classes under the ATLAS project. In March she attended a conference, "Language and Communication in World Business and Professions," in San Diego. She continues to be active as a translator and interpreter for various organizations in the U.S. and Japan.

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, Chair, recently published "Yosano Akiko and Nationalism" in Modern Japon: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism, edited by James Huffman (Garland, 1998); essays on "Gotoba" and "Shikishi Naishinno" in Medieval Japanese Writers, edited by Steven D. Carter (Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998); and "Amerika no Nihongo kyoshi o meguru gensho to tenbo" in Sekai no Ni-hongo kyoiku (Japan Foundation, 1998). Several of her translations of waka have been exhibited and included in the catalogues of the recent exhibitions "Twelve Centuries of Art ftom the Imperial Collections" and "Japanese Art in the Age of Koetsu" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Freer Gallery of Art. Professor Rodd continues to serve as President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese and on a variety of national and international boards and commissions related to pedagogy and language policy.

Kyoko Saegusa, Senior Instructor of Japanese, has been active in a vari ety of projects on campus, including an ALTEC project to create computer-based materials for reading instruction and other projects on pedagogy funded by the MLA and Japan Foundation. Publications include a Teacher's Manual/Lab Book for Yookoso! vols. 1 & 2, co-authored with Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku; an article on "Issues in Articulating Japanese K-16," present ed at the 1998 ADFL Summer Seminar West and published in the ADFL Bulletin; and a translation of a chapter on "Prostitution, Stigma, and the Law in Japan: A Feminist Roundtable Discussion by Group Sisterhood," in Kempadoo & Doezema, ed., Global Sex Workers. She also put together a web site of student-generated exercises for beginning Japanese, funded by a Ronald Walker Grant, and coordinated a workshop on "How People Learn: An Awareness Training Workshop," with distinguished speakers from France and Japan.

Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, edited by Stephen Snyder, Associate Professor of Japanese, and Philip Gabriel, was published in April by the University of Hawaii Press. Snyder's translation of Yoshimura Akira's Kari shakuho (On Parole) will be published by Harcourt Brace this summer. He was also awarded a University Medal in conjunction with receiving the 1998 Kayden Manuscript Prize for Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Norels of Nagai Kafu, which will be published by the University of Hawaii press later this year.

Madeline K. Spring, Associate Chair, was discussant for a panel on landscape poetry in China and Japan at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Holland last summer. She also made three presentations at the national meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages in November and in June will present a session at the 1999 National Foreign Language Resource Center Summer Institute on "Self-Directed Learning: Materials and Strategies" at the University of Hawai'i. Professor Spring is also translator and consultant for the International Buqi Institute in Ghent, Belgium.

Kumiko Takahara, Associate Professor of Japanese, was on leave this year, working on a book about the internment of Japanese Americans in Colorado during WWII, and she gave several talks on this topic in the area. She organized, chaired, and presented a paper on a panel at the 14^th World Congress of Sociology. She also published a paper on "Japanese Third-Person Deixis as a Microcosm of Social Relationships" in Cross-Cultural Communication.

Ayako Yamagata was a visiting instructor in the Japanese language program this iyear. She will be defending her Ph.D. thesis in Japanese linguistics at Michigan State University and will take up a two-year position as Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa in the fall. She participated in the Workshop on Testing given by Prof. Yasuhiko Tosaku last fall. She published an article this year (in Japanese) on the acquisition of katakana spelling by English native speakers in a volume titled Linguistics and Japanese Language Pedagogy.

Faye Yuan Kleeman is a new appointment. She last taught at the College of William and Mary and before that was on the faculty of City College of New York and the University of California at Riverside. Last year she published "A House of Their Own: Constructing The Gynocentric Family in Modern Japan" in Japan Studies Review and presented a paper on the treatment of Manchuria in modern Japanese literature at the Conference on Contemporary Japanese Popular and Mass Culture in Montreal. Professor Kleeman was awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Japan Foundation and will be on leave next academic year.

Minglang Zhou, Assistant Professor of Chinese, received a $5,000 grant from the President's Fund for the Humanities in fall 1998. The funding, together with financial support from the Center for Asian Studies and the Center for the Arts and Humanities, has been used to continue the Chinese Writer/Artist and Literary Critics Speaker Series. This year the series hosted five speakers, including Han Shaogong, Li Tuo, Jiang Zidan, and Wendy Larson. In summer 1998, Minglang also received a grant-in-aid ($4,000) from the graduate school to conduct field work on language policy and bilingualism in Beijing, Hunan, and Xinjiang. Six of his articles on this topic have been published or accepted in international journals, book projects, and conference proceedings.