Joint Center for East Asian Studies Colloquium
The Colloquium Series of the Joint Center for East Asian Studies of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Washington University presents two colloquia annually organized around a single theme. Themes have included international political economy; education and society; science and technology; women in East Asia; and political transitions in East Asia. The colloquium series brings to St. Louis leading scholars in the fields of Chinese, Japanese and Korean studies. The program creates a forum for discussion among local scholars, students, businesspeople and other interested in understanding the modernization and economic development potential of East Asia.
Past Colloquia include:
The Tokyo Trials and After: New Interpretations, New Lives
February 6, 2009 at WU
Yuma Totani, Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor, Boston College
In her 2008 book The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II, Yuma TOTANI challenges the reigning view that the trial was merely victor's justice. Based on meticulous research into the transcripts of the trial, Totani offers the fresh and controversial assessment that the trials were viable. In her current research project "After the Trials: War Criminals and Social Integration in 1950s Japan and Germany," Franziska SERAPHIM investigates the transformation of an issue of criminal responsibility into one of humanitarian crisis and social reintegration in which members of civic, political, and religious groups worked for the release of war criminals. Transnational in scope, both presentations will provide the means to explore the efficacy of war crimes trials and their role in history and memory.
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Colonial Imagination: The Making of Counterculture in Modern Korea
February 15, 2008 at WU
Dr. Choi Kyeong Hee, University of Chicago
“Beneath the Vermillion Ink: Japanese Colonial Censorship and the Making of Modern Korean Literature”
Dr. Soyoung Kim, Korea National University of Arts
“New Women: Her First Song in Colonial Times”
The cultural history of Colonial Korea (1910-1945) has often been told from a dichotomous perspective, pitting imperial oppressors against colonial victims and national resisters against collaborators. Recent studies, however, have begun to look beyond this strictly nationalist interpretive framework. In this colloquium two specialists of modern Korea literary and cinematic studies will take a new, more nuanced look at the relationship between imperialism, nationalism, and colonial countercultures. Their fresh perspectives will bring to life the diverse aspirations and conflicts that characterized the formative period of modern Korean culture.
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Energy, the Global Environment and East Asia
October 5, 2007 at UMSL
Japan’s perspective
Dr. Brian Woodall, Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Programs Samnunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology
China’s perspective
Dr. Ralph Litzinger, Associate Professor and Director Asian/Pacific Institute Department of Anthropology, Duke University
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Peripheral Vision: New Studies on East Asian Borderlands
February 9, 2007 at WU
Dr. C. Patterson Giersch, Assistant Professor, Wellesley College
Asian Borderlands, The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2006)
Dr. Brett Walker, Associate Professor, Montana State University
The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001; paperback reprint, 2006)
Long regarded as the hinterlands—cut off from the real business of cultural development—East Asian peripheries have generally been treated as exotic if not quixotic locales. Recent studies, however, challenge facile assessments of borderlands as cultural “Others” and instead suggest that these locales were actively involved in creating the center. In this symposium, specialists on Yunnan, bordering the southwestern rim of Qing China, and Hokkaido, on the northeastern edge of Tokugawa Japan, will situate these borderlands within the larger enterprise of state building and commercial expansion. Since these two historians of early modern East Asia have drawn on the work of Richard White and other New Western historians, and in order to open the discussion to the wider world of global movements of people and commodities, they will be joined by specialists on the history North American frontiers.
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Health, Illness, and Traditional Medicine in East Asia
October 6, 2006 at UMSL
Medicine, Gender and the Body: Interpretive Perspectives from Chinese History
Dr. Charlotte Furth, Professor of History, University of Southern California
Success of Kanpo in Contemporary Japan: Everyday Health Care and the Body
Dr. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, William F. Vilas Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
East Asian medicine is based on ideas of health, the body, and gender that are different from the foundational ideas of Western medicine. It thus poses fundamental philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of bodily reality. This colloquium will deal with the philosophical challenges posed by the history of medicine in China and will then look at how kanpo, a contemporary Japanese version of East Asian medicine, plays out in everyday healthcare practices in Japan.
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Playing with History
March 24, 2006 at WU
Dr. Frederick R. Dickinson, Associate Professor of Japanese History, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Jina Kim, Lecturer of Korean Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Opening itself to interpretation, reconstruction, and commodification, history has been used to complicate international politics. But it has also been mined for sources of “play.” In our Spring 2006 symposium, we will consider the way contemporary Korean filmmakers deal with Korea's colonial legacy by discussing the film "YMCA Baseball Team."
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Living with History in East Asian
November 4, 2005 at UMSL
Dr. Robert Angel, Associate Director, John C. West Forum on Politics & Policy, University of South Carolina
Dr. Xu Guoqi, Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of History and East Asian Affairs, Kalamazoo College
What does Japan want and why are they not able to offer an apology sufficient for China? What does China want and why are they not able to accept the apology that Japan has already offered? How does the PRC use history to serve the cause of reunification with Taiwan, and how is the Japanese colonial occupation of Taiwan treated in Chinese history?