Spotlight May 2023
Fall 2022
Gabriel Hooper
Spring 2023
Katie Edelson
Derek Arlo Niederer
Erin Sandau
Summer 2023
Luca Gorla
Asian Studies Minor
Ethan Smith
At our graduation ceremony, students will present their thesis research:
Katie Edelson
A Guide to Traveling to South Korea as a Woman
Luca Gorla
Echoes of Horror: The Enduring Impact of the Nanjing Massacre on Chinese and Japanese Media and Relations
Gabriel Hooper
A different perspective on Asian Studies
Derek Arlo Niederer
Apathy and Outrage, A Comparison Between Comfort Women Activism and Camp Town Prostitution in South Korea
Erin Sandau
The Influence of English Education on Korea Society
The Center for Asian Studies is pleased to announce the winners of Fellowships, Scholarships and Grants awarded to graduate students and faculty this spring. Congratulations to all successful applicants!
Graduate Student Awards:
Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships
Academic Year 2023-2024
Aaron Bhatoya
Aaron is an incoming History PhD student. He works on South Asian History with focuses on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, as well as drugs (opium). He is excited to use the FLAS fellowship for the upcoming academic year to strengthen his Hindi skills for future archival and oral history work.
Jeanne Cho
Jeanne Cho (She/her) is in the second year of her Ph.D. program in the History Department. She studies modern Korean history, and plans to use her FLAS award to learn Japanese so that she can use it in future studies of colonial history and also broaden her perspective to consider transnational connections.
Jake Fischer
Jake has always felt that he has a sort of calling to use language skills to help bridge the widening gap between East and West. With the generous support of the FLAS fellowship, he will begin learning Korean to enhance his near-native fluency in Mandarin Chinese in order to further this goal as he explores Confucian and Daoist attitudes towards disability, and specifically how these attitudes may have influenced portrayals in contemporaneous literature. Korea has a strong tradition in Confucianism, and as such, proficiency in Korean language and culture will allow him to explore this topic from a different angle.
Summer 2023 Language Program
David Bachrach
David Fernando Bachrach is a PhD candidate in the 's Department of Geography. He will be attending an intensive Indonesian language course for 8 weeks over the summer at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia's Language Center in Bandung. This language program will be essential for David to achieve his research goals for his dissertation, which includes long-term qualitative research on the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway in Indonesia.
Gabriel Hooper
Gabriel will be studying at the Manabi Japanese Language Institute this summer. He is in the MA program in the Asian Languages and Civilizations Department.
Chelsea Kennedy
Chelsea received her undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Portland, and he is currently a MA student in Religious Studies at . Upon completion of her MA Chelsea plans to pursue a PhD program in Philosophy to further her research interests, which center on Islamic Philosophy and its key role in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. She is particularly interested in medieval philosophy insofar as it can be seen as the basis for the historical narrative that has led to the exclusion or delegitimizing of non-western philosophical traditions. She will be utilizing the FLAS Summer Fellowship to study Arabic at Middlebury Language School’s summer program in Middlebury, Vermont. The opportunity to study in this fully immersive 8-week program will be a vital support in Chelsea’s research, providing the tools for a comprehensive investigation of the Arabic language’s role as a conduit of intellectual discourse.
Tsering Lhamo
Tsering Lhamo is a first-generation Tibetan-American PhD student in the geography department. Tsering’s doctoral research examines the embodied experiences of caterpillar fungus harvesters and traders in the Sikkim Himalayas. Tsering plans to improve her Nepali language skills through the CAS FLAS fellowship for her fieldwork in Nepali-speaking Sikkim, India.
Japanese Studies Scholarship Fellows
Academic Year 2022-2023
Kathryn Yoshie Bertram, Art and Art History
Evelyn Emery, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Gabriel Hooper, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Akane Elizabeth Kleinkopf, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Jordan Knowles, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Sixuan Lu, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Catherine Otachime, History
Raisa Stebbins, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Emma Von Der Linn, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Edward G. Seidensticker Japan Summer Research Grant
Summer 2023
Kathryn Yoshie Bertram, Art and Art History
Catherine Otachime, History
Raisa Stebbins, Asian Languages and Civilizations
Undergraduate Awards:
Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Scholarships
Aidan Euler
Luke Stumpfl
Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships
Summer 2023 Language Program
Andrew Ecker
Aidan Euler
Faculty Awards:
Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant
Ida Fauziyah, Indonesian Instructor, Center for Asian Studies
Ida Fauziyah is a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the for one academic year 2022-2023. She teaches Indonesian Language.
Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Professional Development Grant
The UISFL grant will allow us to strengthen and expand Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at CU by increasing access to THS courses and the number of students who learn about THS. The grant prioritizes expanding curricular offerings beyond faculty already teaching in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies.
Sharon Mar Adams, Instructor, Philosophy Arts and Culture Residential Academic Program
Sharon was selected to receive a Center for Asian Studies Professional Development Award for her course, WGST 2200 Women, Gender, Literature, and the Arts
Galina Siergiejczyk, Instructor, Global Studies Residential Academic Program
Galina was selected to receive a Center for Asian Studies Professional Development Award for her course, RUSS 3333: Spies Like Us: Espionage During the Cold War
Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum Course Development Grant
CLAC Co-Seminar Course Development Grants offer a stipend for the development of a supplemental one-credit undergraduate co-seminar drawing students and content from an existing disciplinary course in any department. Faculty develop and teach this co-seminar using primary Asian language sources to enhance the content of the main course.
Antje Richter, Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Antje will be developing a CLAC Co-Seminar for CHIN 4300 Open Topics: Readings in Chinese Literature - Chinese premodern travel literature. The course covers a broad range of genres of historical and fictional travel literature through two millennia of Chinese imperial history.
Matthias Richter, Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Matthias will be developing a CLAC Co-Seminar for CHIN 3321 Political Thought in Ancient China.
The Asia Symposium 2023:
Environment, Empire, Social Justice
By Tim Oakes, Interim Faculty Director, Center for Asian Studies
On April 21st, CAS hosted the annual Asia Symposium, focusing on this year’s theme of “Asia, Empire, Social Justice: Home & Abroad.” The symposium featured roundtable discussion panels on Asian indigeneities and environmental justice in Asia, and a keynote speech by Professor Sunil Amrith of Yale University. Panelists included CU graduate students as well as faculty from across campus and the Front Range. Rather than offering research presentations, panelists discussed a series of questions posed by moderators Natalie Avalos (Ethnic Studies) and Emily Yeh (Geography). Program and participant details can be found here.
During the first panel on indigeneity, panelists confronted the fraught tension between indigenous identity as both a term invented by colonialism and a source of anti-colonial and nationalist struggle. Meanwhile, for some marginalized groups in Asia – such as the Rohingya – indigeneity is not a useful or meaningful concept, or is wielded from a privileged position of oppression. Thus, the panel helped untangle the historical and geographical complexities of the term, suggesting that even though indigenous movements have a transnational aspect to them, the concept seldom translates easily from one local context to the next. The diversity of Asian places represented in the panel – Northeast India, Myanmar, Tibet, and Gaza – allowed for these place-based complexities and contradictions to emerge in the discussion.
After a lunch break, the second panel discussed issues of environmental justice in Asia, with particular attention to the ways climate change produces new vulnerabilities, injustices, and complicated politics across Asia. Topics covered included toxic marine spills in Vietnam, large scale dispossession and ground water depletion in India that results from the construction of massive solar farms which are otherwise heralded for combating climate change, local impacts of carbon capture and storage technologies in China, water treatment infrastructures in Taiwan, and the impacts of increased mining operations on nomadic herding communities in Mongolia. Throughout these discussions a key theme emerged regarding how ‘green’ development often legitimizes oppressive environmental practices for some of the most vulnerable populations in Asia. But an additional theme was clearly one of contradiction, as panelists grappled with questions concerning the outsourcing of hazardous waste and ‘waste imperialism,’ of pollution as a kind of neocolonialism, and of the local goals of environmental justice running up against powerful forces promoting green energy development at larger scales.
Professor Amrith’s keynote – “Life, Moving: Notes from a Small Island” – explored the broad theme of historical and contemporary redistributions of life on earth. He approached this from the case-study of Singapore, a place wealthy enough to insulate itself from its environment, for example through air conditioning or land reclamation. Amrith brought an historian’s perspective by starting his talk with a reference to the Burmese Banyan in the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a kind of colonial refugee – an ‘orphan of empire’ – removed from its native habitat in the 19th Century by the British and now one of the Garden’s signature specimens. The Gardens, Amrith pointed out, were devoted to the development of tropical economic crops for the British Empire, illustrating the fundamental role of colonialism in the redistribution of life on earth. This theme has continued into present day Singapore, as the island-state’s demand for sand for land reclamation has caused massive redistributions of life in the Mekong River – in Vietnam and Laos – where much of the sand is now dredged for export. While Singapore has excelled at developing technologies of insulation (from a hot climate, or from potential sea level rise) it has been unable to escape the seasonal haze that chokes its spectacular skyline from burning plantations in Indonesia. These plantations, of course, are the legacies of colonialism’s redistribution of life and the Garden’s role in cultivating botanical ‘orphans of empire’ for economic gain. Thus, despite its various insulations from nature, Singapore remains part of nature as well.
Overall, the symposium drew clear connections between Asia and our worlds closer to home, connections that have developed through technology, legacies of imperial ambition, climate change, and social activism. If there was one key takeaway from the symposium as a whole it was perhaps this: not only does Asia provide a valuable comparative lens through which to gain better perspective on the seemingly ‘universal’ concerns of environmental justice and indigenous rights, but – more importantly – exploring these topics is Asia necessitates that we appreciate the webs of interaction and connection that make it impossible to view our lives ‘over here’ as separate from and unrelated to lives in Asia.