Haeng-ja Chung, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anthropology

(hschung@hamilton.edu)

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. She has published an article on the Korean diaspora in The Human Rights and Life (Japanese) based upon her postdoctoral research and another article in The Journal of Human Rights on Korean nightclub hostesses in Japan. Her book reviews have appeared in War and Peace (Japanese) and American Anthropologist. Chung has been awarded a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. While being affiliated at the department of cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo in 2008-2009, she will conduct research on performative, emotional and affective labor of Korean nightclub hostesses in Japan. Based on this research, Chung plans to work on two book projects in English and Japanese. She is also a recipient of Hamilton’s John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award.

Steve Goldberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History

(sgoldber@hamilton.edu)
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). More about Steve Goldberg ...

Hong Gang Jin, Ph.D., William R. Kenan Professor of Chinese and Director of Associated Colleges in China Program

(hjin@hamilton.edu)

Jin came to Hamilton in 1989 after receiving a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She started the Chinese Program at Hamilton in 1989, and in 1996 helped establish the Associated Colleges in China program, a rigorous study abroad consortium in Beijing. Jin was named the 1998 CASE National Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year and in 1996 received Hamilton’s 1963 Award of Teaching Excellence. Jin’s primary interest is language processing and language acquisition. In addition to her books on psychology of language development and studies of language acquisition, she has published numerous articles in professional journals. Her recent research focus has been on classroom process and its effect on language acquisition, resulting in six articles published in 2004-2007 in Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association and other books. Jin is also interested in language pedagogy and is the lead author of three sets of textbooks. A two-volume series, Crossing Paths: Living and Learning in China and Shifting Tides: Culture in Contemporary China (both with DeBao Xu), was published in 2003. She was on the board of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) and was president in 2004-2005. In 2006 she was elected vice president of National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) and she will assume presidency of NCOLCTL during 2008-2010.

More about Hong Gang Jin ...

Masaaki Kamiya, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Japanese

(mkamiya@hamilton.edu)
Masaaki Kamiya has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Maryland at College Park. His current research focuses on scope interactions in nominalization in Japanese and the acquisition processes of Japanese universal quantifier and negative polarity items. Kamiya's recent articles include ‘Movement of Arguments and Negative Feature’, in Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Explorations of Phase Theory: Features and Arguments; "Verbal Nouns in Japanese Are So Called for Good Reasons," Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 4, MITWPL 55, 25 - 36 (co-authored with Seiki Ayano), "DP goal, PP goal, and vP Internal Structure in Japanese,"; "Syntactic categories and argument structures of verbal nouns in Japanese Light Verb Construction" in Journal of Japanese Linguistics 21, among others. Kamiya was awarded a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (PI Akemi Matsuya, Takachiho University) to conduct the acquisition processes of Japanese universal quantifier and negative polarity items.

Chaise LaDousa, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anthropology

(cladousa@hamilton.edu)
Chaise LaDousa, assistant professor of anthropology, attended the college of the University of Chicago and received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He has spent two years in North India studying languages and the role they play in education and India’s rapidly changing political economy. LaDousa taught most recently at Southern Connecticut State University. He has published professional articles in American Ethnologist, Journal of Pragmatics and Language in Society.

Aishwarya Lakshmi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English

(alakshmi@hamilton.edu)
Aishwarya Lakshmi earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2007. She specializes in nineteenth century British India with a focus on landscape aesthetics. She has published articles in the Feminist Review, Economic and Political Weekly, and Biblio. She is currently working on the use of the picturesque in early 19th century India, its shift in the mid-century from a surface aesthetic to an aesthetic of depth, and how this shift dovetails with changes in Indian landscape art production. Her other research and teaching interests include Ruskin, nineteenth and twentieth century Indian “high” and popular art, Indian cinema (especially as it intersects with popular art), and postcolonial theory and literature.

Kyoko Omori, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Japanese

(komori@hamilton.edu)

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.

Lisa Trivedi, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History

(ltrivedi@hamilton.edu)
Trivedi is a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of nationalism, colonialism and women.  Trivedi received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1999. Her dissertation,"Spinning the Nation: Swadeshi Politics, Material Culture and the Making of India, 1915-1935," was made possible by a Fulbright Scholarship to India in 1996 and was nominated for two national prizes.  Among her publications is an article in the Journal of Asian Studies in February 2003 derived from the dissertation. In 2004 Trivedi was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Pembroke College, where she began research on her next book. She has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (2004-05) for this project, "Bound By Cloth: women textile workers in Bombay and Lancashire, 1860-1940." Trivedi was also awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to India for 2004-2005 to conduct nine months of research on the same project in Bombay, Ahmedabad and New Delhi. She is a member of Hamilton's Committee on Asian Studies and of the coordinating committee for The Kirkland Project at Hamilton. More about Lisa Trivedi ...

Jay Williams '54, Ph.D., Walcott -Bartlett Professor of Religious Studies

(jwilliam@hamilton.edu)

Williams, a 1954 graduate of Hamilton College, earned an M.Div. degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. His specialty is the philosophy of religion and in that area he has published two books, The Riddle of the Sphinx and A Reassessment of Absolute Skepticism and Religious Faith, as well as several articles. Never content with just metaphysical abstractions, he has applied his philosophical understanding to the thought of both west and east, publishing books about the ancient Hebrews, Jesus, and Jewish history He has also written several scholarly articles about Mesopotamian mythology, the Bible, the Cambridge Platonists, theosophy and Christian theology. Williams has also published articles on the I Ching, The Confucian Analects, the Tao Teh Ching, the Lotus Sutra, and the Vimalakirtinirdesasutra. In 2000 he published a biography of Edward Robinson (Hamilton 1816), the 19th century explorer of Palestine and long-time president of the American Oriental Society. In 2004 he published a translation of and commentary upon a previously unknown gospel, probably from Tang dynasty China. In a different vein, Williams published The Voyage of Life, a collection of his own poetry as well as Around the Quad, a collection of verse that evokes memories of Hamilton College. In 2008 he published The Path and it Power: Lao Zi’s thoughts for the 21st Century, as well as Religion, What it has been and what it is. Today, most of Williams' courses concern religious thought and expression in south and east Asia. More about Jay Williams.

Thomas Wilson, Ph.D., Professor of History

(twilson@hamilton.edu)
Wilson, who joined the Hamilton faculty in 1989, earned a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also studied in Taiwan, at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (or Stanford Center), and in the graduate department of history at the National Taiwan University. He returned to Taiwan in 1984 on a Department of Education Fulbright-Hays scholarship to conduct research for his dissertation. Wilson has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ, and he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Summer Stipend. He has written extensively on Confucian orthodoxy and is a board member of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions.  Wilson edited On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius (Harvard, 2003), to which he also contributed two chapters and is currently co-authoring a cultural history of Confucius titled Confucius through the Ages, to be published by Random House. More about Thomas Wilson ...

De Bao Xu, Ph.D., Chair, Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures

(dxu@hamilton.edu)
De Bao Xu earned an M.A. in history of the Chinese language at Beijing Normal University in 1985, and M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1988 and 1991 respectively. He teaches modern Chinese, classical Chinese, and Chinese culture courses. Xu is the editor-in-chief (with James Huang, Harvard University) of Contemporary Linguistic Theory Series, 1st ed., 8 volumes; 2nd ed., 12 volumes, (China Social Sciences Publishing House, Beijing). He is the author and co-author of textbooks and multimedia software: Chinese Breakthrough and China Scene: An Advanced Chinese Multimedia Course (both Cheng & Tsui), Crossing Paths: Living and Learning in China and Shifting Tides: Culture in Contemporary China (Beijing University Press). Xu is the chair of organizing committee of the biennial International Conference on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching in the 21st Century. More about De Bao Xu ...

Steve Yao, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Associate Dean of Faculty for Diversity Initiatives

(syao@hamilton.edu)

Steven Yao, associate 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 Translation and the Languages of Modernism (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002) and co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota 2008). An edited volume of essays, Pacific Rim Modernisms, will be published in 2009. Yao’s academic interests include literary translation, poetry, Asian American literature and cross-cultural poetics. In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for his current book project, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counterpoetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910-Present. The book is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Yao also served as a Stanford Humanities Center External Junior Faculty Fellow for 2005-06. The award involved a 10-month residency at the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He has published essays in journals such as Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Textual Practice, and Representations.

Christopher Vasantkumar, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Anthropology

(cvasantk@hamilton.edu)
Christopher Vasantkumar, assistant professor of anthropology, earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton and master's and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an anthropologist of China, specializing in the study of ethnic diversity in the People’s Republic.