The Asian Studies program kicked off the year with an international call for applications for Emerging Scholars in Asian Studies spearheaded by director Vimalin Rujivacharakul in collaboration with 10 departments at UD. The call attracted 78 proposals from top universities around the world. Through the teamwork of Alice Ba (Political Science and International Relations), Renee Dong and Chika Inoue (Languages, Literatures and Cultures), Alan Fox (Philosophy), Ram Rawat (History), Chandra Reedy (CHAD), Patricia Sloane-White (Women and Gender Studies), Vikram Thakur (Anthropology) and Joelle Wickens (Art Conservation), 17 emerging scholars were selected to present papers on campus. This project drew attention to our program from across the field, including outreach from the Association for Asian Studies' headquarters in Ann Arbor.

Our other activities were equally exciting; in October, the Graduate Student Group in Asian Studies (GSGAS) was established, with grad students Yoo Jin Choi, Sam Callanta and Lucy Li elected to lead a group of 23 graduate students. We also held five major public events within the span of 8 months:

• ​Afghan Week (October 2023) led by Vikram Thakur and Pete Benson in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology.
• Korean Week (November 2023) led by Sunmin Yoon, together with her team of Daewa Kim, Yoo Jin Choi and 14 UD students, in collaboration with the School of Music and with Xiang Gao directing the Master Players Concert Series to close the week.
  
• Japan Week led by Alice Ba and the Department of Political Science and International Relations in collaboration with Rujivacharakul, which combined the visit of the Ambassador of Japan, Mikio Mori, with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences' conference. The College of Arts and Sciences hosted the ambassador's reception.
• Chinese Week (April 2024) produced in collaboration with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. We are also grateful to Ivan Sun and his team at the Chinese American Community Center of Delaware.
• Black China (May 2024) produced by GSGAS in collaboration with the UDARI-Asian American Antiracism Initiative and the Provost's Office, which featured a talk by the globally celebrated African American scholar on pre-modern China, Don Wyatt.

Faculty accomplishments:

Alice Ba was recognized with the Emma Smith Morris Professorship in September 2023, Alan Fox guest-edited a special issue of Religion on Daoist Metaphysics, for which he and Maria Tu also contributed articles. Vimalin Rujivacharakul won the Japan Society for Promotion of Sciences Grant, guest-edited a special issue of the Winterthur Portfolio and was awarded another three-year distinguished visiting professorship from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Sunmin Yoon received the Korea Foundation Grant to support employment of contract faculty members and, in 2023, together with her two co-editors, won the Honorable Mention for the Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize for their book, Mongolian Sound Words (Illinois, 2022) from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Haihong Yang was elected the 2023-2024 president of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies, and Rachael Hutchinson was awarded a College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellowship for the project “Translating Japanese Videogame Theory," 2023-2025.

At the close of May 2024, we have 45 Asian Studies students in total. During the 2023-2024 academic year, the Asian Studies program gained 26 new students: 12 new majors (four of whom converted from Asian Studies minors), 10 new Asian Studies minors, and 6 Asian Studies minors who converted to Asian Studies with Language minors.

Between December 2023 and May 2024, 17 of our students graduated in total. Winners of the David Pong Awards for outstanding undergraduate students in Asian Studies this year are: Alex Dwornikowski, Anna Wilson, Angela Hoang, Krystal Diaz and Isabella Lam.

We are proud of our faculty members and students!

Faculty Publications, 2023-2024

Alice Ba. 2023 “Diversification's Challenges: ASEAN & its Myanmar Predicament." International Affairs 99(3). Oxford University Press.

Alice Ba. 2023 “The United States and ASEAN: Bilateralism and Regionalism in a Changing Asia." In Routledge Handbook of US policy in the Indo-Pacific, eds., Oliver Turner, Nicola Nymalm and Wali Aslam. Routledge.

Alan Fox. 2023 “Metaphorical Metaphysics in the Dao De Jing." Religion. MDPI.

Rachael Hutchinson. 2024 “Colonial Moments in Japanese Videogames: A Multi-directional Perspective." in Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us, ed. Christopher Patterson and Tara Fickle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Frank Mondelli. 2023 “Aesthetic In-Access: Notes from the CripTech Metaverse Lab." Leonardo 57(2). MIT Press.

Frank Mondelli. Mark Bookman, and Setsuko Yokoyama 2023 “Putting Virtual Reality to Disability Activism: Co-Creation and Intersectional Pedagogical Usage in Japan." International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. May. ScienceOpen.

Ramnarayan S. Rawat. 2023 “How to Write New Histories of Caste: A Dalit History of Chamars." Oxford Handbook of Caste in Modern World, eds. S. Jodhka and J. Naudet. Oxford University Press.

Chandra L. Reedy. 2023 “Black Coal Cinder Ceramics: An Unusual Technological Choice in Sichuan Province, China." Techné: Science in the service of art history and the preservation of cultural heritage 55, Techné Journal Open Access, Ministry of Culture of France.

Chandra L. Reedy. 2023. “Body Relics in Tibetan and Mongolian Traditions." Research on Early Chinese Lacquer Buddhas, edited by Donna Strahan and Blythe McCarthy. London: Archetype Publications.

Chandra L. Reedy. 2024. “The Disappearing Technology and Products of Traditional Tibetan Village Blacksmiths." Heritage 7. MDPI.

Vimalin Rujivacharakul. 2023. “Buildings of the Ocean: Ephemerality and Monumentality," Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 82(3). University of California Press.

Vimalin Rujivacharakul. 2024 “Asian Aesthetics and America: Problems and Promises." Winterthur Portfolio 57(2-3). University of Chicago Press.

Maria Tu. 2023 “Reversal is the Movement of the Way." Religion. MDPI.​