Grants - Center for Asian Studies

Description
Call for Proposals | Annual Visiting Faculty Awards
Funded by the J. Yang and Family Foundation

Application deadline March 5, 2021

The Center for Asian Studies invites UCI faculty to submit proposals to bring visiting faculty from Taiwan through a gift from the J. Yang and Family Foundation. The goal of the visiting faculty program is to build long-term scholarly research and institutional relationships between UCI faculty and departments and their counterparts at the four participating universities in Taiwan.  Visiting faculty awards will be made by invitation only based on the opportunity to develop new or existing academic connections that foster ongoing collaboration.

UCI faculty are invited to submit requests to host a visiting faculty member from Taiwan through this program Two awards will be made each year in Year 2-5 of the five-year program. Proposals are particularly encouraged from the Schools of Social Ecology, Social Sciences and Humanities.

Proposals for Year 3

The Center for Asian Studies is accepting applications for one visiting faculty award ($6,500) in 2022-23 (Year 3). UCI faculty may invite a faculty member from one of the following universities in Taiwan for a short-term residency:

o National Taiwan University;
o National Chiao Tung University;
o National Tsing Hua University;
o National Cheng Kung University.

The residency may include working on a collaborative research project, participating in a graduate seminar or colloquium, or otherwise engaging with faculty, graduate students and programs at UCI.  The level of activity should correspond to the length of the residency.  Invitations to present a single talk or speak at a conference will not be considered.

UCI faculty should not expect to receive funding to invite more than one visiting faculty member during the term of the program.

A faculty committee appointed by the Center for Asian Studies will review the proposals for potential long-term relationships between the researcher/institution and UCI, as well as for visiting faculty awards to a range of disciplines and departments on campus.

Review Committee: Bert Scruggs (Chair), Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature, Department of East Asian Studies; Qitao Guo, Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Center for Asian Studies; Yang Su, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology; Yong Chen, Professor, Department of History

Submission

Proposals must be submitted by Friday, March 5, 2021 via
https://scout.eee.uci.edu/s/Yang2021

The proposal should include the following:

o The name and department of the UCI faculty member issuing the invitation
o The department that will coordinate the visiting faculty member’s activities and contact person with email address and phone number
o Name and affiliation (department, university) of proposed invitee
o Upload a PDF CV of proposed invitee

o Upload a single PDF with:
• A 250-word description of existing or potential long-term relationship with UCI. This may be a collaboration between individual researchers, or it may be part of an institutional partnership.
• A 250-word description of the visiting faculty member’s activities while at UCI and how these activities will contribute to building the long-term relationship described above.
• A proposed budget (max $6,500). Budget must include flight and ground transportation between Taiwan and Irvine, as well as housing, meals and local transportation while in residency.

Questions? Contact Joo Hoon Sin, CAS Program Coordinator, at sinjh@uci.edu and 949-824-7141.

https://scout.eee.uci.edu/s/k8u5keh5a-2020

Description
Faculty Grants

Faculty in any UCI department working on Asia are eligible to apply for a CAS grant of up to $1,000. Grant funds may be used for the following:

o Research travel, such as flights, ground transportation, and lodging; archival and copying fees; and other research expenses, such as translation or transcription;
o Conference travel, including registration, conference meals, flights, ground transportation and lodging;
o An Asia-related conference or workshop taking place at UCI in the 2021-2022 academic year

The online application form includes a short description of how this activity will contribute to the field, to your research project and/or to Asian Studies at UCI, and a brief explanation of how the funds will be used.  Apply online at https://scout.eee.uci.edu/s/it6uz87g3-2021

Description
Graduate Student Grants

Graduate students in any UCI department whose research focus is on Asia are eligible to apply for a CAS grant of up to $1,000. Grant funds may be used for the following:

o Research travel, such as flights, ground transportation, and lodging; archival and copying fees; and other research expenses, such as translation or transcription;
o Summer language study, including tuition, travel and lodging summer language study;
o Conference travel, including registration, conference meals, flights, ground transportation and lodging.

Please note that funds to travel to an in-person conference will only be released if the current UCI travel restrictions in response to the COVID-19 public health crises have been lifted. Follow the pre-approval process in UCI Travel Directive
(https://uci.edu/coronavirus/executive-directives/UCI20_UCI_TravelDirective_08-17-20.docx.pdf)

The online application form includes a short description of how this activity will contribute to your graduate study/dissertation project and a brief explanation of how the funds will be used.  Apply online at https://scout.eee.uci.edu/s/8y6igyg4s-2021

Description
Co-Sponsorships

The Center for Asian Studies will provide co-sponsorships of up to $500 for Asia-related events held on the UCI campus, such as lectures, film screenings, and cultural events. Co-sponsorships are awarded on a rolling basis as long as funds are available. Requests for co-sponsorship must be made at least one month in advance of the event. To request a co-sponsorship, send a short description of the event, including the primary audience, to Qitao Guo, CAS director, at guoq@uci.edu at least one month prior to the event.  CAS will publicize co-sponsored events on its website calendar and to its email list. Please provide event details and publicity materials such as fliers to the CAS program coordinator, Joo Hoon Sin, at sinjh@uci.edu no later than two weeks prior to the event.

Description
Ayuko Takeda
Department of History
09/24/2019

My research has investigated the military service of Japanese Americans who joined the U.S. military during the Korean War. During WWII, Japanese Americans living on the West Coast experienced internment camps. When the Korean War began, many of those Japanese Americans served in intelligence activities and interrogated North Korean prisoners of war and refugees in the Japanese language. My question here is how the U.S. military mobilized Japanese Americans for its war projects in the Pacific, who were once incarcerated to the camps but now facilitating the incarceration and interrogation in Korea. In order to further examine Japanese Americans’ roles in the combat intelligence, I particularly analyzed intelligence reports archived in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland (NARA II) from September 16th to 20th.

At NARA II, I examined the G-2 record of the 24th Infantry Division, in which many Japanese Americans had already served for intelligence activities in postwar Japan. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the 24th Infantry Division was the first unit to send its soldiers from Japan to Korea. It is normally difficult to identify lower-rank individual Japanese Americans in their writing of intelligence reports. Yet some of the division records, especially daily journals and interrogation reports, left individual names of Japanese Americans who gathered information about the beginning of the war as well as who interrogated North Korean POWs. Moreover, a couple of those names in these reports matched those whose personal collections I have already obtained. Therefore, such identification of Japanese Americans in the division record will enable me to combine military record and individual personal memories to understand Japanese Americans’ roles in the Korean War.

In addition to the G-2 records of the 24th Infantry Division, I also analyzed records of civilian camps in Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa during WWII. It was not only during the Korean War that the paradox of “incarceration” worked for Japanese Americans in the U.S. military. During the Asia-Pacific War, the U.S. military built civilian camps to “protect” civilians who were devastated by each battle between the U.S. and Japan—Camp Susupe in Saipan, Camp Churo in Tinian, and many camps in Okinawa. Many Japanese Americans served as Japanese interpreters and interrogators to facilitate these civilian camps in the Pacific. Since there are few military records of these camps, I asked for meetings with archivists working on the Army and Navy records. They kindly helped me locate potential records which contain some documents of those civilian camps. As a result, I was able to gather a variety of textual and visual sources of civilian internees in each camp across the Army and Navy records. Yet I was not able to find individual Japanese Americans on these sources. In my future research, I will continue to work on such challenges in military records. 

The histories of civil camps in Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa have been ignored and erased in the scholarship on the Asia-Pacific War. Japanese American service members’ roles in those camps, as well as those in the Korean War, have also been little told in Japanese American history and U.S. military history. This archival research trip became a solid preparation for my future dissertation, which aims to elucidate the chains of incarceration in the Pacific from WWII to the Cold War. I hope to contribute to a further understanding of how the U.S. expanded its imperial projects in Asia and the Pacific in the twentieth century.

Description
Kaitlyn Rabach
Department of Anthropology
06/12/2020

Last summer, I received a $300 grant from the Center of Asian Studies to support my preliminary research in Myanmar. My budget last summer included flights to and from Southeast Asia, rent for a 28-day period in Yangon, living expenses, and tutoring in intermediate Burmese (writing and speaking). The $300 helped contribute to this budget and helped me reconceptualize and add to my findings from my 2017 Masters dissertation from SOAS, University of London.

Because of this time in Myanmar, I was able to rethink this dissertation with new primary evidence, allowing me to use various anthropological literatures, especially on secrecy, imaginaries, and enchantment to further explore how imaginaries of Myanmar as a pure and Buddhist nation in its tourist industry, were weaponized by the tatmadaw, Burmese military, and other political offices for the purposes of Buddhist extremism in Myanmar. Through a method of misdirection or even distraction, the Myanmar Tourism Ministry produces an illusion of Myanmar as an “enchanted” and cheerful land, strategically ignoring the various active conflicts in the nation’s borderlands. For Myanmar, the category of enchantment is particularly rooted in narratives of discovery, the unknown, and untouched lands. These representations mirror colonial imaginings, especially those found in the infamous magazine National Geographic. Because imaginaries are complex, fleeting, reductive and almost impossible to crystallize for lengths of time, I found the government works with other mediums of representation to (co)produce their image of an “enchanted” land. My work at SOAS, continued with the work from this additional grant, crystallized—if even for a brief moment—some of the imaginaries that contribute to the touristic image of Myanmar. This work attempts to understand how modes of “enchantment” are produced, specifically through means of performance, embodiment and encounter. In the same vein, too, it works to expose some of the secrets of this magical image. Ultimately, my work within the context of Myanmar problematizes the image and heritage of Myanmar as both a strictly Bamar and Buddhist nation.

This fieldwork in both 2017 and continued in the summer of 2019, was amidst a backdrop of a rise in Buddhist extremism movements throughout the country and this movement heavily influenced my current study on populist movements in Europe and more precisely in the Republic of Ireland. It also allowed me to see the intersecting theological trends that are often involved and included in various populist movements. This grant, then, contributed not only research in the field of Southeast Asian studies, but also led to conceptualizing research questions that will hopefully add to literatures on the anthropology of populism, the anthropology of Europe, and interdisciplinary studies on the rise of the alt-Right across the globe.

Description
Monish Borah
Department of History
12/16/2019

As a direct result of the generous Center for Asian Studies Graduate Student Grant, I was able to spend over one month (24th June 2019 to 30th July 2019) in London, UK carrying out archival research in the British Library. I work on the Bengal Famine of 1769-70 so I spent my time examining archival materials from the revenue, commerce, administrative, military and naval Departments of the East India Company. The two broad objectives that I had while carrying out my research there were to find material to supplement the ideas present in my first year research paper as a way to further my research by collecting sufficient material to write my second year research papers. To that effect, some of my important findings and activities were as follows: I recorded significant climate related data from journals of ships visiting Bengal during the famine. I actively sought out and recorded data from the military records which proved to be a great source of information on the economy especially for someone like me who is interested in how the entire economy operated in contrast to just being fixated with the European dominated coastal economy. Despite the destruction of almost all the ship manifests belonging to the British East India Company, I managed to piece together enough material to conclusively determine how much bullion was being exported to India and China (separately) during the second half of the eighteenth century. I also managed to get a hold of the first botanical and zoological survey that was carried out in Bengal during the late eighteenth century. Additionally, I went through substantial anthropometric and correspondence records, hydrological surveys and maps germane to my research interests. In London, I also consulted leading experts in South Asian History and Economic History like Prof. Robert Travers (Cornell University), Prof. Jon Wilson and Prof. Peter J. Marshal (King’s College London), Prof. Mrinalini Sinha (University of Michigan) and Prof. Albrecht Ritschl (London School of Economics and Political Science).

Description
Rong Kong
Department of History
01/29/2020

I travelled to mainland China and Taiwan to collect archival documents from June to December 2019. This
was a productive trip for my research. First of all, I found a lot of original records related to my project from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Given that most of those documents are fragmented in different archives, I examined them in different locations (Jining, Jinan, Shanghai, and Nanjing) instead of staying Qufu as I planned in my proposal. Documents from Jining (the superior city of Qufu), Jinan (the capital city of Shandong province) enable me to explore how the situations in Qufu were reported/understood at the higher-level government. Records in Shanghai and Nanjing archives indicate the continuity and discontinuity of the policies regarding Confucius by the Nationalist Party and Communist Party. Second, the oral project I have conducted during this trip provides additional details and stories to these written records. It is high time to interview those people who experienced the two campaigns respectively when not all of them still keep a good memory in their 70s and 80s (in some cases, 90s). The last but not least, I got the chance to communicate with scholars on two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Their comments and suggestions are very helpful for my understanding of the studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Chinese Renaissance.

There are a great number of individuals in both mainland and Taiwan I would like to thank for their invaluable support to my research. Prof Li Xianming of Qufu Normal University shared his experiences in Qufu archive and the oral projects he conducted in his earlier research which partly pertains to my dissertation. Ms. Kong Jun of Qufu Cultural Bureau allowed me to access to the republican version of the Genealogy of the Kong family. Mr. Kong Deyong, the director of Kong Family Association, talked me about his childhood stories while he stayed in the Kong Family Mansion 80 years ago. The 93- year-old gentleman uncovered his first-hand living stories/secrets I never read before. In addition to his precious experience and suggestions in conducting historical research, Mr. Wang Liang gave his notable book (Kong Fu Da Jienan [The Catastrophe of The Kong Mansion], a forbidden book in mainland China) to me when he learned that I was not able to find the book on the market. Prof. Lien Ling-ling and Prof. You Jianming of the Academia Sinica provided useful comments on how to rethink my project from the perspective of gender studies. Prof. Paul Katz of the Academia Sinica gave me an introduction to do research on Kuomintang cultural policies. Prof. Lin Guoxian and Prof. Liu Weikai of National Chengchi University introduced me to the resources of their university. Prof. Lin Guoxian, with tremendous generosity and good humor, shared most of his collections of the Chinese Cultural Renaissance accumulated when he wrote his master thesis. Without their support, I would never complete my research smoothly.

The UCI Center for Asian Studies(CAS) grant is helpful to me mentally and physically. In the first place,
the award is an encouragement to me to continue my project. In contrast to previous studies, which tend to look at all of the mainland or all of Taiwan, I focus on two specific locales: Qufu and Taipei. While both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Chinese Renaissance have been studied independently, little or no research has asked how the modern reception of Confucianism may form concrete historical links between the two campaigns. In the second place, the archival records I collected in this research trip are of great importance to my dissertation. As of now, I am analyzing those documents. One of my preliminary findings is the propaganda carried out by Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang was more active and overwhelming than previous studies. I will compare how Chiang’s propaganda in the Chinese Cultural Renaissance to that of Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution in one chapter of my dissertation. With the support of 2019-2020 CAS graduate student research grant, I was able to conduct this trip. Therefore, I am grateful for all the sponsorship by the CAS.

Description
Shiqi Lin
Department of Comparative Literature
06/29/2020

I would love to thank the Center for Asian Studies for providing a summer grant to assist with my language study at the Middlebury Japanese school in the summer of 2019. This grant, along with other funding sources, allowed me to attend eight-week intensive language training and greatly improved my Japanese language skills. At Middlebury, I took intermediate-level classes, participated in cultural clubs and events, and obeyed a language pledge which required us to use Japanese in a 7/24 setting during the entire program. By the end of this program, I achieved basic reading and writing proficiency in Japanese and gained a more systemic understanding of the current sociocultural issues pertinent to Japanese society. After attending this program, in the fall quarter, I was also able to take a fourth-year Japanese class at UCI to read Japanese canonical and contemporary literature and further polish my language skills.

In the long term, although the focus of my research is on contemporary Chinese media culture, I consider Japanese culture and social experience as an important counterpart of my cultural comparison. I am looking forward to incorporating my study of Japanese language and culture in the following fields of my research:

• Cultural politics in post-Fukushima Japan: With the coupling of nuclear disasters, socioeconomic precarities and unresolved postwar traumas in the post-Fukushima period, Japan today seems to have provided me with a cultural site to learn how the people there have formed communities to bring each other life in crises. I am especially interested in studying how literature, arts, music and cinema have taken social interventions and brought positive changes to people searching for justice and cohabitation in Japan.

• Japanese media ecology: Media studies is usually a highly Euro-American centric field, but the study of Japanese media cultures has arguably provided some of the richest thoughts and approaches outside Euro-American models. To this end, as I situate my research within the burgeoning field of Chinese media studies, I am hoping to delve more into Japanese references on media theory.

• Imperialist thinking and infrastructures in the formation of Japanese empire in the early twentieth century: Because of Japan’s shifting positionality in the twentieth-century from a self-perceived vulnerable oriental nation to a major colonial power and then to a major postwar economic power, intellectuals in Japan have produced some of the most complex postcolonial reflections for the study of cultural politics across East Asia. As China today is also shifting its role in global economy and politics, I am hoping to engage with an archival and theoretical research on the imperialization of twentieth-century Japan to study what experience can be drawn from history and what forms of decolonial politics may be possible for China without embarking on the road of hegemony and empire.