Kenyon College


 

Asian Studies at Kenyon

What We Do | Who We Are | ASIANetwork

 

What We Do

The Asian Studies Program at Kenyon offers a concentration that incorporates a variety of courses in history, religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, political science, and language. The program also sponsors films, invites speakers to the College, organizes field trips for students, and promotes other social and cultural events to stimulate campus awareness of the societies of East and Southeast Asia, India and its neighbors, and the Islamic world.

With Asia as its point of reference, the curriculum encourages students to deal with Asian peoples as actors on the scene of regional and world history, rather than as objects of non-Asian peoples’ enterprises and observations. An important goal of the concentration is the development of a critical understanding of the ways in which people of the interrelated regions of Asia have historically defined and expressed themselves.


Who We Are

Joseph A. Adler
Professor of Religious Studies (Director)

Jianhua Bai
Professor of Chinese (on leave 2005-06)

Sarah Blick
Associate Professor of Art History (on leave 2005-06)

Ruth W. Dunnell
Storer Associate Professor of Asian History

John H. Finefrock
Adjunct Instructor of Asian Studies

Nurten Kilic-Schubel
Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Michelle S. Mood
Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

Sudarsan Padmanabhan
Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Vernon J. Schubel
Professor of Religious Studies

Wendy F. Singer
Professor of History

Anna Xiaodong Sun
Dissertation Teaching Fellow / Visiting Instructor in Sociology

Hideo Tomita
Associate Professor of Japanese

Yang Xiao
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Jie Zhang
Visiting Instructor of Chinese


ASIANetwork

Kenyon is an institutional member of ASIANetwork, a consortium of 150 colleges working to promote Asian Studies in undergraduate, private liberal arts settings. Kenyon has been a member of ASIANetwork since its beginning in 1992, and one of the Kenyon faculty, Rita Kipp, has served on its Board of Directors.

Asian Studies at Kenyon has benefited from a number of ASIANetwork programs. In 1997, 1998,. and 1999, two graduating seniors were selected to teach for a year in China through a program coordinated by ASIANetwork and the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. Through this same institutional collaboration, Kenyon hosted a visiting scholar during the 1997-98 school year, Professor Wang Chunxiu of Fudan University in Shanghai.

Kenyon was also the host institution for a faculty development seminar on Southeast Asia. Co-directed by Professor Rita Kipp of Kenyon and Professor Leedom Lefferts of Drew University, the seminar drew nine college teachers to the campus for three weeks in the summer of 1998. In the summer of 1999 the group traveled together to Southeast Asia for three weeks. This two-year seminar was funded through ASIANetwork by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Three Kenyon faculty were recipients of grants from the Freeman Foundation administered through ASIANetwork that allowed them to travel to Asia in the summer of 2000, each in the company of a student, and to engage in research together. Brian Dott, Visiting Assistant Professor of History 1999-00, went to China along with a student from Kalamazoo College; Professor Joseph Adler went to Taiwan in the company of Philip A. Davolos ('01) to study ancestor worship; Professor Miriam Dean-Otting worked in Calcutta in the summer of 2001 with Erin Saunders and Ronnie Saha.

Finally, Kenyon representatives have attended each of ASIANetwork's annual conferences, where the program includes sessions on curriculum, program development, grantsmanship, and pedagogy as well as scholarship.

Comments to: Joseph Adler
Last Edited: 10/6/05


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