Daniel Behar is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies/Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. His research project focuses on modern and contemporary Syrian poetry in a global context. He proposes to present his work on the Aleppine Sufi poet Kheir al-Din al-Asadi. Al-Asadi's collection
Songs of the Shrine (1950) is a veritable mosaic of translations and transmissions from the ample corpus of Sufi devotional poetry composed in the various languages of the Near East (Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian). This collection, as well as al-Asadi extensive socio-linguistic and ethnographic work, will be shown to hybridize errant visionary modernism with the proud local identity of Aleppo as a strategic contact zone between the cultures of Asia from Hotan to Istanbul along the Silk Road.
Brian Bernards is an Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His research is inspired by larger questions about intercultural contacts and translingual exchanges within Asia, particularly between East and Southeast Asia, as well as between Sinophone and non-Sinophone communities in those regions. He explores issues of multiculturalism, creolization, and postcoloniality beyond East-West configurations that have dominated and defined discussions of these issues in comparative cultural studies, at times inadvertently flattening the internal diversity and uneven power dynamics within the various sites that collectively constitute the “East.” He is most interested in how authors and filmmakers wrestle with the dominant discourses and master narratives that claim to speak for their subjectivities and cultures, particularly by creatively replicating their experiences of travel, migration, minoritization, and creolization within and between East, South, and Southeast Asia. He is the author of
Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015) and the co-editor of
Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
Richard F. Calichman is the Professor of Japanese Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the City College of New York. His scholarly interests focus on modern Japanese literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. Publications include
Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West (2004);
What is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (2005);
Contemporary Japanese Thought (2005);
Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (2008);
Philosophy and the Political in Wartime Japan, 1931-1945 (2009);
The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai (2010);
The Frontier Within: Selected Writings of Abe Kōbō (2013);
Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō (2016); a translation of Abe Kōbō's novel "Beasts Head for Home" (2017).
Shine Choi teaches Political Theory and International Relations at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. She is also Associate Editor for
International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Co-editor of the book series,
Creative Interventions in Global Politics with Rowman and Littlefield. Her research areas include how a state like North Korea constructs the international as a space of politics; visuality and aesthetics; postcolonial feminist theory; and critical/creative methods. Recent publications include
Re-imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives (Routledge, 2015), ‘Art of Losing (in) the International’ (
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2017), ‘Re-dressing International Problems, For Example, North Korean Nuclear Politics’ (
Review of International Studies, forthcoming) and
Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation co-edited with Anna Selmeczi and Erzsebet Strausz (Routledge 2020).
Satoru Hashimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Thought and Literature Department at Johns Hopkins University. He holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University and a BA and an MA in French literature and culture from the University of Tokyo. His forthcoming book,
Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Literatures, examines how modern literature in China, Japan, and Korea was produced in the contexts of these nations’ interrelated literary traditions. He has published in English, Japanese, Chinese, and French on topics in comparative literature, aesthetics, and thought engaging East Asian and European traditions. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of World Literature. He is also undertaking a second project entitled
Stateless Time: A Transcultural History of Postwar East Asia, 1945-1953, which will examine the transcultural memories of colonialism and war in East Asia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
Immanuel Kim is The Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Associate Professor of Literature and Culture Studies Korean at George Washington University. He is a specialist in North Korean literature and cinema. His research focuses on the changes and development, particularly in the representations of women, sexuality, and memory, of North Korean literature from the 1960s to present day. His book
Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction explores the complex and dynamic literary culture that has deeply impacted the society. His second book called
Laughing North Koreans: Culture of the Film Industry is on North Korean comedy films and the ways in which humor has been an integral component of the everyday life. By exploring comedy films and comedians, Kim looks past the ostensible propaganda and examines the agency of laughter. Kim has also translated a North Korean novel called
Friend by Paek Nam-nyong.
Ungsan Kim is currently a Collegiate Fellow and will join as an Assistant Professor both the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Film, TV, and Media at the University of Michigan starting in Sep 2021. As a scholar of Asian cinema, he has published essays on queer Korean cinema and contributed chapters on Korean cinema as well as on Korean literature to edited volumes. He is currently at work on a monograph exploring the aesthetic and political response of queer Asian cinema to the neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and hyper-modernization.
Annette Damayanti Lienau is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to the often binary (colonial/post-colonial) constructions used in more isolated studies of national literatures. Her work has been generously supported by national fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. Professor Lienau’s current book project,
Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Cultural Politics from the Arabophone to the Afro-Asian, engages with the political and cultural legacy of Arabic as a sacralized language, underscoring its changing symbolic value across the twentieth century in West African, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. It examines how Arabic, as a sacred, religious medium, impacted the formation of national literatures in ways that contrast with vernacular, European literatures evolving from a Latin ecumenical context. This project also traces the ways in which regions in West Africa and Southeast Asia, once culturally unified through the common use of the Arabic script, were later divided through the colonial introduction of European languages.
Yuanfei Wang is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and assistant professor at the University of Georgia. Her first book
Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, May 2021) connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China, Hideyoshi invaded Korea, Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrated pirates and China’s Orient in maritime Asia. I show that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea were fluid, ambivalent, and dialogical: they simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the “other:” foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated. Connecting late Ming literature to the global maritime world,
Writing Pirates expands current discussions of Chinese diaspora and debates on Sinophone language and identity. Her co-authored short book
Early Globalism and China’s Literature is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2022. The book offers six case studies on the ways China’s literature was involved in early globalism from Han dynasty to early Ming. Her peer-reviewed journal articles appear on
positions: asia critique,
CLEAR,
Ming Studies,
Nan Nu,
Journal of the Siam Society, among others. Her next book project will examine translation and globalism in late imperial China.
Emily Wilcox is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at William & Mary. She previously served as tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Wilcox is a specialist in Chinese dance and performance culture, with broader interests in twentieth-century global history, transnationalism, gender, and social movements. Her first book,
Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy, was published by the University of California Press in 2018 and is winner of the 2019 de la Torre Bueno Prize© from the Dance Studies Association. Wilcox is co-editor of
Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press, and co-creator of the
Pioneers of Chinese Dance digital photograph archive, published in 2017 by the University of Michigan Asia Library. She has published more than twenty journal articles and book chapters, in English and Chinese, in leading venues in Asian studies, dance studies, and performance studies.
Miya Q. Xie is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. Her research interests include comparative East Asian literature, colonial and post-colonial literature, frontier studies, translation studies, gender and sexuality, and trauma studies. She is currently finishing her first book manuscript,
Borderland Matters: The Making and Unmaking of National Literatures in East Asia (1920-1950), and working on her second book project on Ethnic Korean literature in China. She is also guest editing a special issue for
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature on Chinese literature across the borderlands with David Wang and Kyle Shernuk. Her articles appear and will appear in
Journal of World Literature,
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature,
Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production, and
Imagining Communities: Reading Contemporary China Against the Grain.