A truly multidisciplinary concentration, the Asian Studies program draws enthusiastic faculty members from the anthropology, art, music, history, government, East Asian languages and literature, comparative literature, and theatre departments.
Lawrence Chua, a historian of the modern built environment, received his Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development at Cornell University. He has taught courses in the history and theory of art and architecture as well as studio design at New York University and Chulalongkorn University. Chua's research interests include the structural manifestations of race and nation in architecture and urbanism, the integration of political, economic and art histories, and the ways that the material aspects of art and the built environment acquire rhetorical characteristics. He received an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for his dissertation, "Building Siam: Leisure, race, and nationalism in modern Thai architecture, 1910-1973" and was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
Haeng-ja Chung, assistant professor of anthropology, joined the Hamilton faculty in 2006 after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and Colorado College. She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA. Chung has published articles and book reviews in Gender and Labor in Korea and Japan, Journal of Asian Modern Women’s History, War and Peace, Journal of Asian Studies and American Anthropologist in English and Japanese. She was awarded a fellowship and research grants from the Social Science Research Council and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. While being affiliated at the department of cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo for two years, she conducted research on performative, emotional and affective labor. Based on the research, she writes an ethnographic monograph on high-end Korean nightclub hostesses in Japan. Chung was also a recipient of Hamilton’s John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award.
Goldberg specializes in the history of Chinese art. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Since the early 90s, he has participated as instructor and director of numerous summer institutes and region conferences of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), a joint program of the University of Hawai'i and the East-West Center that was initiated to infuse Asian content and perspectives into the core curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities. He has published numerous articles and chapters in books on Chinese art and philosophy, with a particular interest in Chinese calligraphy. Publications include “The Primacy of Gesture: Phenomenology and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy,” in “Metamorphosis,”(2004); “Philosophical Reflection and Visual Art in Traditional China,” in “Teaching Texts and Contexts: The Art of Infusing Asian Philosophies and Religions,” (SUNY Press, 2004); and "Recognition of the True Self: Zen Buddhism and Bokuseki Calligraphy," in “Zen no Sho: The Calligraphy of Fukushima Keido Roshi” (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2003).
Charlotte Lee received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in political economy and Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include authoritarian politics, public bureaucracies, and the politics of transitioning regimes. Lee is currently working on a book manuscript which examines institutional adaptation in the People’s Republic of China, particularly how market incentives have shaped the behavior of organizations located within the Chinese Communist Party. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2004-2009) and John Gardner Public Service Fellow (2000-01). From 2002 to 2004, Lee was a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania. For the 2012-13 academic year, she is Minerva Chair at the U.S. Air Force Academy. She teaches courses on Chinese politics, comparative politics and international relations.
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Kyoko Omori earned her doctorate from Ohio State University in 2003. Her research focuses on 20th-century literary and popular culture, with an emphasis on mass media. She is currently completing a book titled Detecting Modanizumu: New Youth Magazine, Tantei Shôsetsu, and The Culture of Japanese Vernacular Modernism. In addition, her recently published articles and book chapters include “The Art of the Bluff: Youth Migrancy in the Pacific Rim, Interlingualism, and Japanese Vernacular Modernism” (2009), “Narrating the Detective: Nansensu, Benshi’s Oral Performance, and the Absurdist Detective Fiction of Tokugawa Musei” (2009), “Rajio hôsô no sengo: ‘Hanashi no izumi’ to ‘Nichiyô goraku-ban’” (The Allied Powers’ Education and Censorship Strategies in Post-WWII Japan: Radio Broadcasting in the late 1940s: 2008), “‘Finding Our Own English’: Migrancy, Identity, and Language(s) in Itô Hiromi’s Recent Prose” (2007). She has been awarded research grants from The Miller Center for Historical Studies and the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, as well as postdoctoral fellowships from SSRC/JSPS, the Japan Foundation, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Omori was also trained in language pedagogy and is a recipient of the Hamako Ito Chaplin Award, a national award recognizing excellence in teaching Japanese.
Trivedi is a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of nationalism, colonialism and women. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1999. Her first monograph, Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Indiana, 2007) was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to India in 1996. In 2004 Trivedi was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Pembroke College, where she began research on her second monograph project, Bound By Cloth: women textile workers in Bombay and Lancashire, 1890-1940. Research for this project has received support from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Scholars Program. Trivedi is working concurrently on a project of 70 photographs taken by an Indian photographer, Pranlal Patel, in 1937. The Jyoti Sangh Series is an extraordinary collection of photographs of ordinary women at work on the streets and in the neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, India. In addition to publishing these photographs for the first time with three critical essays, Trivedi is curating a photographic exhibition that has been scheduled for the Wellin Art Museum in January 2014. Trivedi currently serves as co-editor of ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, the premier publication of ASIANetwork, a consortium of 165 liberal arts with Asian Studies programs.
More about Lisa Trivedi ...
Christopher Vasantkumar, assistant professor of anthropology, joined the Hamilton faculty in 2006. He holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2002, he has conducted ethnographic field research in multiethnic communities in northwest China as well as amongst the Tibetan populations of Himachal Pradesh, India. His research interests center on the place of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in national and trans-national envisionings of China and Chineseness as well as on the intersection between Chinese discourses of minzu (“ethnicity”) and global imaginings of race, nation and indigeneity. Vasantkumar teaches courses on the politics of difference, transnationalism and globalization and the anthropology of money.
Steven Yao, professor of English, earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at Ohio State University from 1997 to 2002. Yao is the author of two books, Translation and the Languages of Modernism (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002) and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford, 2010) which in April was selected by the Association for Asian American Studies for its Book Award in Literary Studies.
He is also co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota 2008), Pacific Rim Modernisms (Toronto 2009), and Ezra Pound and Education (2012). Yao’s academic interests include literary translation, poetry, modernist literature, Asian American literature and cross-cultural poetics. In 2012 he was awarded an ACE Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year. In 2005 Yao was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and he also served as a Stanford Humanities Center External Junior Faculty Fellow for 2005-06.
Back to Asian Studies overview.
The Asian Studies Program offers a remarkable blend of structure and flexibility in coursework. The major consists of nine courses in at least three departments and includes language study as well as an introductory course on Asia's great cities. Further courses focus on either a single country or a regional theme; within this broad framework, students design their own curriculum.
Asian studies majors are encouraged to take advantage of Hamilton's study-abroad opportunities. The Associated Colleges in China Program has won recognition as one of the top approaches to studying the Chinese language and culture. In addition, the New York State Independent College Consortium for Study in India introduces students to the geographic and cultural diversity of northern India each fall.
Hamilton has an unusually large Asian studies faculty for a liberal arts college of its size. Faculty members in the program are based in the humanities, history, the social sciences and languages. Their expertise encompasses China, India, Indonesia and Tibet, and ranges from contemporary politics and culture to traditional arts, thought, religion and ritual. Two members of the faculty are nationally recognized leaders in using technology to teach Chinese.
As a truly interdisciplinary field with a flexible curriculum, Asian studies has wide appeal as a second major or minor. Recent students have combined coursework in the program with interests in government, technology, the arts, business, education and world politics to position themselves for professional life after Hamilton.
The Asian Studies Program offers a remarkable blend of structure and flexibility in coursework. The major consists of nine courses in at least three departments and includes language study as well as an introductory course on Asia's great cities. Further courses focus on either a single country or a regional theme; within this broad framework, students design their own curriculum.
Asian studies majors are encouraged to take advantage of Hamilton's study-abroad opportunities. The Associated Colleges in China Program has won recognition as one of the top approaches to studying the Chinese language and culture. In addition, the New York State Independent College Consortium for Study in India introduces students to the geographic and cultural diversity of northern India each fall.
Hamilton has an unusually large Asian studies faculty for a liberal arts college of its size. Faculty members in the program are based in the humanities, history, the social sciences and languages. Their expertise encompasses China, India, Indonesia and Tibet, and ranges from contemporary politics and culture to traditional arts, thought, religion and ritual. Two members of the faculty are nationally recognized leaders in using technology to teach Chinese.
As a truly interdisciplinary field with a flexible curriculum, Asian studies has wide appeal as a second major or minor. Recent students have combined coursework in the program with interests in government, technology, the arts, business, education and world politics to position themselves for professional life after Hamilton.
The Asian Studies Program offers a remarkable blend of structure and flexibility in coursework. The major consists of nine courses in at least three departments and includes language study as well as an introductory course on Asia's great cities. Further courses focus on either a single country or a regional theme; within this broad framework, students design their own curriculum.
Asian studies majors are encouraged to take advantage of Hamilton's study-abroad opportunities. The Associated Colleges in China Program has won recognition as one of the top approaches to studying the Chinese language and culture. In addition, the New York State Independent College Consortium for Study in India introduces students to the geographic and cultural diversity of northern India each fall.
Hamilton has an unusually large Asian studies faculty for a liberal arts college of its size. Faculty members in the program are based in the humanities, history, the social sciences and languages. Their expertise encompasses China, India, Indonesia and Tibet, and ranges from contemporary politics and culture to traditional arts, thought, religion and ritual. Two members of the faculty are nationally recognized leaders in using technology to teach Chinese.
As a truly interdisciplinary field with a flexible curriculum, Asian studies has wide appeal as a second major or minor. Recent students have combined coursework in the program with interests in government, technology, the arts, business, education and world politics to position themselves for professional life after Hamilton.
The Asian Studies Program offers a remarkable blend of structure and flexibility in coursework. The major consists of nine courses in at least three departments and includes language study as well as an introductory course on Asia's great cities. Further courses focus on either a single country or a regional theme; within this broad framework, students design their own curriculum.
Asian studies majors are encouraged to take advantage of Hamilton's study-abroad opportunities. The Associated Colleges in China Program has won recognition as one of the top approaches to studying the Chinese language and culture. In addition, the New York State Independent College Consortium for Study in India introduces students to the geographic and cultural diversity of northern India each fall.
Hamilton has an unusually large Asian studies faculty for a liberal arts college of its size. Faculty members in the program are based in the humanities, history, the social sciences and languages. Their expertise encompasses China, India, Indonesia and Tibet, and ranges from contemporary politics and culture to traditional arts, thought, religion and ritual. Two members of the faculty are nationally recognized leaders in using technology to teach Chinese.
As a truly interdisciplinary field with a flexible curriculum, Asian studies has wide appeal as a second major or minor. Recent students have combined coursework in the program with interests in government, technology, the arts, business, education and world politics to position themselves for professional life after Hamilton.
