Happy new year and welcome back students! Warm greetings from the Center for Asian Studies here at CU. All of us at the Center are looking forward to a full spring semester of events and outreach. We would like to welcome Carla Jones, our interim faculty director for the Center while Tim Oakes is on a well-deserved sabbatical in Hong Kong. We sent him off with a simple request: that he eat feast on good dim sum for us.
Carla comes to the Center as an anthropologist of Indonesia. Her research is on the role of gender and consumption in the formation of new middle-class public culture. She has worked in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, where the visible rise of Islamic taste has been a central site for these questions. http://www.colorado.edu/Anthropology/people/bios/jones.html
Carla is especially proud of the fact that the Center will be adding a Southeast Asia track to our undergraduate major in Asian Studies. We will also be hosting three high-profile keynote addresses, two of them on Southeast Asian border politics.
Please add our Spring events to your new year’s schedule or feel free to stop by the Center to meet Carla or our fantastic team. We look forward to meeting many of you personally over the next six months.