Looking to the Future of CAS,
Near and Far
As a new academic year begins, I am deeply honored and excited to be taking on the role of faculty director of the Center for Asian Studies. A few months ago, many of us thought the COVID-19 pandemic was winding down. And then over the summer, India and Indonesia became new global hot spots, and as I write this, the US is also in the midst of a Delta variant surge. In the last few weeks, it has become clear that the virus is not yet done with the world. Nevertheless, with our campus community well vaccinated, the CAS office is open and staff including me are working onsite once again.
Read Rachel's full article here.
CAS introduces our new Tibet and Himalayan Studies Program
The University of Colorado Boulder is one of the top research programs in the country in Tibet and Himalayan Studies, but undergraduate students have been unable to pursue a directed course of study in that field—but scholars are working to change that.
On Sept. 28, 2020, the department received an Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education for the next two years. The grant supports efforts in the Center for Asian Studies to create a new certificate program in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. With the expansion of the curriculum, a new instructor position opened, which led new Asian Studies instructor Tenzin Tsepak to the University of Colorado Boulder.
Announcing 2021-22 Event Theme
We’re excited to share our theme for this academic year and look forward to working with colleagues across campus to discover all that we can do with it!
The CAS theme for the 2021-22 academic year is “Intermountain Asia”. With this theme we seek to recognize the many Asianists who work in the Rocky Mountain Front Range and neighboring areas, along with the importance of building a community of Asianists within this region. We also draw attention to the myriad connections between our corner of the world and Asia. Through this theme, we hope to better connect with our fellow Asianists nearby, and to cultivate a vision of Asian Studies that does not limit “Asia” to a distant place or an object of inquiry far removed from our everyday lives here in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region more broadly. During the 2021-22 academic year, we will feature events that speak to these themes, drawing on the wealth of Asian Studies expertise throughout our intermountain region.
CAS Welcomes New Instructors!
Lauren Collins will be joining us for the 2021-22 academic year as a temporary instructor to teach ASIA 2000 Gateway to Asian Studies, ASIA 4200 Politics of Memory and Heritage in Asia, and ASIA 4500 Urban Asia: Tradition, Modernity, Challenges in the fall and additional classes in the spring. Lauren received her PhD in 2019 from the University of Denver and joins us from the University of Montana, where she has been teaching in the Davidson Honors College.
Thanks to a grant from the US Department of Education, CAS has been able to create a new Instructor of Tibet and Himalayan Studies position which will be filled by Tenzin Tsepak this fall. Tsepak comes to us from Indiana University, where he has just completed his PhD in Central Eurasian Studies. Tsepak will be teaching ASIA 1700 Introduction to Tibetan Civilization; ASIA 4300 Open Topics in Asian Studies – Encounters: Tibet, the Himalayas and the West; TBTN 1110 Colloquial Tibetan I; and TBTN 1210 Modern Literary Tibetan I. Check out these great new courses!
Akhmad Taufik has arrived from Samarinda, East Kalimantan, Indonesia as our new Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant for 2021-22t. Taufik is an English teacher in Indonesia and is also interested in sharing Indonesian cuisine, fashion, dance, and handcrafts with his students and the CU/Boulder community during his term. We look forward to working with him to further expand the Indonesian language and culture offerings at CU while he is here. Interested students can enroll in INDO 1110 Beginning Indonesian I or INDO 2110 Intermediate Indonesian I to work with Taufik this fall.
CAS hosts A Tale of Two Asias: Living In and Beyond the Nuclear Age
Supported with a grant from the Albert Smith Nuclear Age Fund, the Center for Asian Studies is hosting a series of three focused workshops exploring this “Tale of two Asias.” We will explore Japanese and Chinese modes of living in the nuclear age through a technopolitical lens, including considerations of the impacts of energy infrastructures on everyday life, social movements and cultural engagements with nuclear energy development, and the political implications of infrastructural risk and vulnerability. Collectively, these workshops will ask: What are the technopolitical dimensions of efforts to both survive in and move beyond the nuclear age in Asia? What do we learn from paying particular attention to the Japanese and Chinese contexts of these efforts?
The Second Workshop,
China’s Nuclear Belt & Road Socio-technical perspectives on China’s export nuclear infrastructures
will be held in April 2022 at CU Boulder.
CAS Wraps Up Third China Made Workshop
In May 2021, scholars from around the world – Australia, Canada, Cambodia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and the United States – met in a four-day workshop hosted by the National University of Singapore, the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Toronto to consider how the Chinese experiment in infrastructure development in Southeast Asia is lived. The workshop papers which examined cases from West Papua to Yunnan Province confirmed the centrality of infrastructure to the “China Model of Development,” and that a key to understanding this drive is an analysis of its emergence from, and effects within, China’s domestic economy.
Read a summary of the workshop here.
Third China Made Workshop - "Betcha Nickel: Manifold Routes to the Metropolitan in Indonesia," keynote address from AbdouMaliq Simone
Latest Colorado Journal of
Asian Studies Published!
We are pleased to announce the publication of the Spring 2021 issue of the Colorado Journal of Asian Studies. This issue contains papers written by students in the ASIA 4830 Senior Seminar class, an excerpt from an honors thesis in International Affairs, as well as a special section featuring two policy-oriented papers from the IAFS 4500 Culture and Conflict in South Asia course. These papers cover a wide range of issues and cultures, including “Sexuality and Gender Expression in Male K-Pop Groups: Queering Hwarang Culture, Contemporary Korean Masculinity, and Fandom Desires” by Reilly Gabel, “Painting Identity on the Peninsula: A Century-Long Search for ‘Korean’ Art” by Anne Feller, “Institutional Barriers and Temporary Shanghai Migrants” by Renee Gagne, “Investing in Equitable Development in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka” by Thomas Raney, and “Emissions Trading in India: A Policy for Combatting Toxic Air and Global Warming” by Colton Zadkovic.