HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Harvard-Yenching Institute Director Tu Weiming recently welcomed 30 visiting scholars and fellows to the institute for the 2006-07 academic year. "Yenching Institute offers a unique opportunity to create a learning community of scholars in the humanities at Harvard each year, benefiting both the scholars themselves and Harvard," Tu noted.

The scholars, faculty members in the humanities and social sciences from selected universities in Asia, will spend one year conducting research at the institute. "These scholars are selected by a faculty committee from among over 150 applicants submitted by more than 50 partner institutions in Asia," said Ruohong Li, the visiting scholars program manager.

During the past year, the institute has successfully sponsored and organized seminars and conferences for its scholars at Harvard University. "This is the 52nd consecutive year of the institute's visiting scholars program, and it continues to play a major role in developing higher education and research in the humanities in Asia and at Harvard," adds Executive Director Peter Kelley.

This year's visiting scholars:

Deming An is a professor and senior researcher of folklore at the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from Beijing Normal University in 1997. While at the Yenching Institute, he is working on transformation and reconstruction of popular religion in a changing village in the Tianshui area. This project attempts to explore the interrelationship between popular religion and the dramatic social changes in contemporary northwest China.

Xinyu Cao is an associate professor at the Institute of Qing History, Renmin University of China. He received his Ph.D. from Renmin University of China in religious history in 2001. His fields of specialization include the social history of the Ming-Qing period (1368-1911) and the history of Chinese popular religion. The research project he proposes for his stay at the institute is titled "Geneticism of the Chinese Heterodoxy: Mythology and History of the White Lotus Sects."

Xiangzhan Cheng is a professor of Chinese aesthetics, School of Literature and Journalism, Shandong University, China. He received his Ph.D. in literature from Shandong University in 1995. During his stay at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he is working on a project titled "The Chinese Conception of Fecundity of Life (sheng-sheng) in the Axial Age and the Construction of Contemporary Eco-Aesthetics." He is interested in current ecological and environmental aesthetics.

Young-Nam Cho is an assistant professor of the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University, Korea. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Seoul National University. With a major focus in political science (comparative politics), he has chiefly studied contemporary Chinese domestic politics and international relations. While staying at the Yenching Institute, Cho is conducting research on China's rule of the law policy and the changing state-society relationship.

Feng Deng is an associate professor of the School of Law, Peking University, China. He received his B.A., M.Phil., and S.J.D. from the School of Law, Renmin University of China. While staying at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he is conducting a project titled "A Legal & Economic Approach to the Confucian Legal Tradition" to explore the rationality of traditional Confucian legal mechanisms in a new approach called historical law and economics.

Hideaki Fujiki is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Letters at Nagoya University, Japan. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in film studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research has been focused on the historical formation and transformation of the film star system in prewar Japan. His current project is to examine cinema as an intersection between consumer culture and national education in Japan from the 1910s through the 1950s.

Changchi Hao is an associate professor of philosophy at Wuhan University, China. He received his Ph.D. degree in philosophy from Fordham University, New York. His areas of specialization include philosophy of religion, Chinese philosophy, and contemporary European philosophy. During his stay at the Yenching Institute, he will undertake a case study on methodological issues related to comparative studies of Chinese and Western philosophy.

Yoshiteru Hayashi is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Letters and Arts, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. He earned his Ph.D. from Tohoku University in 2005. He studies ancient Indian religious thought. During his stay at the Yenching Institute, he is working on the Brhadaranyaka-Upanishad, one of the earliest Upanishads.

Julia C. Huang is an associate professor of anthropology at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Boston University in 2001. She has also been a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. Her research interests include religion, embodiment, and transnationalism, with a special focus on the relationship between religion and cultural identity in globalizing contexts. She is currently finishing a book on the embodiment of the charismatic leadership of a global Taiwanese Buddhist movement.

Toshiaki Kimura is an associate professor of the Department of Religious Studies at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Tohoku University. His research has focused on Indonesian society and religion, and he has conducted fieldwork in Medan, the capital city of North Sumatra province, since 1995. While staying at the Yenching Institute, he is conducting a research project titled "Religion, Identity and the Image of the Others in a Southeast Asian Metropolitan City."

Shang-jen Li is a historian of medicine at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He also teaches at the Department of Social Medicine, National Taiwan University. He received an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Imperial College, University of London, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled "Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century China."

Tao Liang studies Chinese intellectual history, especially early Confucianism. He received both his M.A. and his Ph.D. in intellectual history from Northwest University, China. Liang is well known in studies of unearthed bamboo slips and early Confucianism and has published important articles in this field. His research at the Yenching Institute is titled "Guodian Bamboo Texts and Si-Meng School."

Guoxiang Liu is an ethnic Mongolian. He obtained his degrees from the Department of Archaeology, Peking University, and from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests cover the Chinese prehistoric jades, bronzes of the steppe region, and prehistoric cultural contacts and exchanges in northeastern Asia. Science Press of China published his work "Essays on the Northeastern Cultural Relics and Archaeology" in 2004.

Shiyung Liu is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pittsburgh. In the past five years, most of his work has been related to fields such as history of modern medicine, Japanese colonialism, and historical demography. During his research stay at the Yenching Institute, Liu plans to conduct new research on the transition standards of medical practice and education in Taiwan. In addition, he will have constant interaction with scholars sharing research interests.

Thi Phuong Cham Nguyen is a researcher at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (Hanoi). She earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Cultural Studies in 2005. Her scholarly interests include traditional literature, rites, festival, customs, and how these cultural constructions change in modern society. As a visiting scholar of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she will focus her research on a project titled "Identity of the Kinh in Wanwei (Guangxi, China) Through Their Festival."

Hyungji Park is an associate professor of English literature at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. She received an A.B. in English and American literature from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Her main research interests include the Victorian novel, postcolonial studies, and Asian American literature. During her year at the institute, she will be working on Western representations of Asia in general and, more particularly, on the ways in which 19th century British literary, cultural, and diplomatic texts depict and understand Korea.

Joseph Siu Kam-wah is instructor I in the Department of History, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his D.Litt. in 2001 from Kyoto University with the Japanese Government Scholarship Grants. He has been teaching Tang-Song history and Japanese sinology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Japanese language at other universities and academic institutions for several years. While at the Yenching Institute, he will be working on the evolution of metropolitan administration during the Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasties.

Parichart Sthapitanonda earned her Ph.D. from Ohio University and is currently an associate professor at the faculty of communication arts at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Previously, she worked as the deputy director of social research at the Institute of Chulalongkorn University from 2002 to 2004 and served as the president of the Ph.D. program and the deputy dean for the graduate programs at Chulalongkorn University from 2004 to 2006. Her current research area focuses on communication and campaigns in various topics, ranging from commercial to noncommercial and political issues.

Zhongxin Sun is an associate professor of sociology at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Her research/teaching interests include women's/gender studies, sexuality, lesbian and gay studies, and contemporary Chinese society. During her stay at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, her main research work will focus on gender issues in contemporary Chinese society. The title of her research plan is "Gender Issues, Gender Groups, and Cultural Myths: Towards Achieving Gender Equality in Contemporary China."

Xiuli Wang is an associate professor at the School of History and Culture, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China. She earned her Ph.D. from Ji'nan University (Guangzhou, China). Her academic interests are in the economic and social history of middle and late imperial China. The research program for her stay at the Yenching Institute is "Vicissitudes of the Merchant-Scholar Cultural Circle in Taicang Around the Turning Point of Yuan and Ming."

Wilson Wong is an associate professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2002-03, Wong served as a visiting fellow in the Center for Northeast Asian Policies at the Brookings Institution. His major research interests are public administration and management, public budgeting and finance, public policy analysis, and Hong Kong politics. During his stay at the Yenching Institute, he will work on a project titled "Hong Kong after 1997: Hong Kong's Post-Handover Governance and Implications for China, Taiwan, and the U.S."

Zhenhua Yu is a professor of philosophy at East China Normal University, Shanghai. He earned a Ph.D. in Chinese philosophy in 1998 at the Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University. Yu recently finished his second doctoral project - "On the Tacit Dimension of Human Knowledge" - at the Center for the Study of the Natural Sciences and the Humanities (SVT), University of Bergen, Norway. The project he proposes to work on at the Harvard-Yenching Institute is titled "The Crisis of Epistemology and a Possible Way Out."

Fengqian Zhang is an associate professor of the Department of Philosophy, Sun Yet-Sen University, Guangzhou, China. He received his Ph.D. from the Chinese Academic of Social Science. His research interests include the history of conceptions in Chinese traditional philosophy, ancient philosophical literatures, archaeological documents related to Chinese philosophy, and the study of Confucian classics to cultural and social issues in modern China. His research project at the Harvard-Yenching Institute is on Shi Jing and early Chinese philosophy.

Guomin Zheng is a professor at the College of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University. He received his Ph.D. in Chinese educational history from the Department of Education, Beijing Normal University. His research interests focus on Chinese educational history, Chinese teaching policies, and curriculum in elementary and middle school. While at the institute, he will be working on a project titled "Foreign Culture in Chinese Textbooks in the Early 20th Century (1900-1935)."

Changzheng Zhou is an associate professor of law, Nanjing University, China. He earned his Ph.D. from Peking University in 2001. His main research interest is law in the fields of labor, employment, social security, economics, and real property. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, his research subject is "Social Justice Theory and Legal Regulation of Employment Discrimination in China."

This year's visiting fellows:

Hon Fai Chen received his M.Phil. in sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2001. He is currently a Ph.D. sociology candidate at that university. Chen's dissertation topic is the impact of the structural position and cultural orientation of the Chinese gentry upon the development of study association and civil society as well as the transformation of civilization in late imperial China. His research interests include sociological theory, comparative-historical sociology, and Chinese society and culture.

Jinhee Kim is working on her doctoral dissertation at Yonsei University in South Korea. Her major area is Korean medieval poetry. The subject of her master's thesis was the influence of music on ballads in the Koryo dynasty. She has been studying the relationships between music and literature since then. She is alsointerested in the oral tradition in Korean literaturebecause Korean medieval poetry recorded in Hangul was very much influenced by music and oral performance.

Mika Marumoto is a Ph.D. candidate in international studies at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Her fields of specialization are Northeast Asian political economy, private sector development, and human rights and development. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she continues to work on her dissertation on China's role in North Korea's institutional change and economic reform, from a multidisciplinary approach.

Mariko Naito is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tokyo. After receiving college education from Hitotsubashi University, Japan, she studied medieval Japanese poetry at the University of Tokyo and earned an M.A. degree. Naito is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation while teaching as a part-time lecturer. During her stay at Harvard, she'll focus her research on one of the aesthetic ideas in medieval Japanese poetics and explore the theoretical framework for the conception of time and memory.