Events

Spring 2012 Lectures

Asian Studies-Sponsored Lectures

MAY

15 April, 2012, 4pm, University School of Nashville Payne Library Room
Michael Puett, Harvard University
"Reflections on the State of Teaching Chinese in American Schools"

 

News

Asian Studies Program Welcomes New Faculty

Nancy Lin has been appointed Assistant Professor of Religious Studies for Buddhism. She will begin teaching at Vanderbilt in the spring of 2013.

Brief Biography:
Nancy Lin is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Department of Religion and with the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She specializes in Buddhist traditions of Tibet, with particular interests in narrative literature and art, hagiography, the intersection of monastic and courtly culture, and religion and cross-cultural interaction with India and China. She was educated at Harvard University (A.B., 1999), Columbia University (M.A., 2003), and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 2011). Her current book project is based on doctoral research on the Wish-Fulfilling Vine, a Sanskrit Buddhist narrative anthology translated into Tibetan and popularized through textual and visual adaptations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is also engaging in new research on Tibetan religious poetry and its production in material, ritual, and institutional contexts.

Bryan Lowe has been appointed Mellon Assistant Professor of Religious Studies for Japanese Religions. He will begin teaching at Vanderbilt in the fall of 2012.

Brief Biography
Brian Lowe's research focuses on transcribing Buddhist scripture in eighth-century Japan. He graduated from Middlebury College in 2003 with a double major in Religion and Japanese Studies and holds an MA in East Asain religions from Princeton. Currently completing his PhD at Princeton, he has held a Fulbright IIE to conduct dissertation research. He has also spent two years working as a Coordinator for International Relations on the JET Program in Nagano, Japan.

 

Asian Studies Program in the News

Click here to read Asian Studies Gaining Ground from the VANDERBILT INTERNATIONAL, Summer 2011

Recent Faculty Publications (2009-2012)

Rob Campany:

Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China (University of Hawai'i Press, June 2012)

 

In early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Each tale recounted extraordinary events involving Chinese persons and places—events seen as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the reality of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America's preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents in this volume the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan's Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E.

In addition to the translation, Campany provides a substantial study of the text and its author in their historical and religious settings. He shows how these lively tales helped integrate Buddhism into Chinese society at the same time that they served as platforms for religious contestation and persuasion. Campany offers a nuanced, clear methodological discussion of how such narratives, being products of social memory, may be read as valuable evidence for the history of religion and culture.

Readers interested in Buddhism; historians of Chinese religions, culture, society, and literature; scholars of comparative religion: All will find Signs from the Unseen Realm a stimulating and rich contribution to scholarship. For order information, please click here.

             

Making Transcendents:  Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (University of Hawaii Press, 2009).
Winner, American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Historical Study of Religion category.

 

Gerald Figal:

Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa (Rowman and Littlefield, 2012)

 

This original and fresh book explores Okinawa's makeover as a tourist mecca in the long historical shadow and among the physical ruins of the Pacific War's most devastating land battle. Gerald Figal considers how a place burdened by a history of semicolonialism, memories of war and occupation, economic hardship, and contentious current political affairs has reshaped itself into a resort destination. Drawing on an innovative mix of detailed archival research and extensive fieldwork, Gerald Figal considers the ways Okinawa has accommodated war experience and its legacies within the manufacture and promotion of both a "tropical paradise" image and a heritage tourism site identified with the premodern Ryukyu Kingdom. Tracing the postwar formation of "Tourist Okinawa," Figal addresses interrelated issues of economic sustainability, local political autonomy, interregional and international relations, environmental preservation, historical and cultural self-representation, and especially Okinawa's role as a global peace site laboring under the legacies of war. From the end of World War Two to the present, the author follows Okinawa's evolution through three main themes: war memorialization, tourism-influenced environmental and historical restoration, and invasion and occupation represented by U.S. military bases and beach resorts. Creatively, accessibly, and eloquently written, this compelling work highlights a set of islands that represent key issues facing contemporary Japan.

 

Peter Lorge:             

 

Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, December 2011)

In the global world of the twenty-first century, martial arts are practiced for self-defense and sporting purposes only. However, for thousands of years, they were a central feature of military practice in China and essential for the smooth functioning of society. Individuals who were adept in using weapons were highly regarded, not simply as warriors but also as tacticians and performers. This book, which opens with an intriguing account of the first known female martial artist, charts the history of combat and fighting techniques in China from the Bronze Age to the present. This broad panorama affords fascinating glimpses into the transformation of martial skills, techniques, and weaponry against the background of Chinese history, the rise and fall of empires, their governments, and their armies. Quotations from literature and poetry, and the stories of individual warriors, infuse the narrative, offering personal reflections on prowess in the battlefield and techniques of engagement. This is an engaging and readable introduction to the authentic history of Chinese martial arts.

  The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Edited by Peter Lorge (Chinese University Press, 2011).