@UIUC: Patrick Drazen talk: "Gay, Kind-of Gay and Pseudo-Gay in Anime and Manga: What's the Point?" (22 Oct, 4-5:30pm; Noyes Lab 163)

"Gay, Kind-of Gay and Pseudo-Gay in Anime and Manga: What's the Point?"

a public lecture by Patrick Drazen

Thursday, 22 October 2009
4:00-5:30
Noyes Lab 163

From the cross-dressing of Osamu Tezuka's Princess Sapphire in Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi, orig. 1953-56) and Ryoko Ikeda's Oscar de Jarjayes in The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no bara, 1972-73) to the fake twincest of the Ouran High School Host Club (Ouran Koukou hosuto-bu, 2003-), Japanese pop culture has not been shy about playing a variety of sexual games with its consumers. However, given the essential conservatism of pop culture's message despite cutting edge story-telling techniques, there is far more teasing going on than actual same-sex romance. In this presentation, using clips from various anime, Drazen will show that the point of most works is to nudge the consumer toward the conventional rather than away from it.



Patrick Drazen is the author of the Anime Explosion: The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation (2003). He has given presentations at the Cherry Blossom Festival Anime Marathon at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (2006), Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits (2004), Yaoi-Con (2002), and, for the past several years, Anime Central in his hometown of Chicago. He also participated in a panel discussion with Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino as part of the Chicago International Film Festival (2006). Drazen has written on anime and manga for the magazines Animation, SFX, and Time Out New York, and sits on the editorial board of and has contributed to the manga and anime studies journal Mechademia. He is currently working on his second book.

This talk is sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, the School for Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Resource Center, the Department of Comparative and World Literatures, and the Gender and Women's Studies Program.

CFP: “Mysterious Things”: The 11th Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History (1 Nov; 4-6 Mar; UIUC)

A good number of EALC students have presented at this conference in the past. It's a very supportive place to get experience if you haven't presented very much or at all. And of course there's no transportation or hotel expenses.

You do not have to be focused on history in your degree as long as the paper you propose has a historical aspect to it. This paper could be something you've written or plan to write for a course.

If you haven't presented before, you might want to ask a colleague with experience to help you work on your proposal/abstract.

"Mysterious Things”: The 11th Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / March 4-6, 2010

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2009

The Executive Committee of the Eleventh Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce this call for papers. The Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department’s Women’s History month celebration, is scheduled for March 4-6, 2010. To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women’s and gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any institution and discipline. The Symposium organizers welcome individual papers on any topic in the field of women’s and gender history; papers submitted as a panel will be judged individually. Preference will be given to scholars who did not present at last year’s Symposium.

The Symposium Executive Committee is interested in assembling a geographically, temporally, and topically diverse body of papers. This year’s theme, “Mysterious Things,” speaks to a variety of trends that are currently shaping the field of women’s and gender history. This is particularly the case as we march on through a world where things—be they ideas, objects, or some strange mix thereof—continue to delight, baffle, liberate, and ruin individuals, as well as global institutions. Successful proposals could directly explore and build upon the implications of the moment in Marx’s thought concerning commodities, wherein what should become inanimate matter actually assumes a mysterious, yet undeniable kind of life. Proposals could begin to chart out this life in a variety of fields—particularly gender and sexuality—and its
effects upon those with whom it comes into contact. Indeed, gender and sexuality are, themselves, mysterious things, and proposals could also include any work that seeks to expose and demystify their strange functions in the everyday life of people and institutions. We welcome all proposals that seek to examine and interrogate any of the nebulous, enigmatic areas included under the rubric of gender and women’s history. The choice of theme is purposefully broad but provocative, inviting
perspectives and reflections from a variety of temporal, geographical, and inter/disciplinary perspectives.

For this year, the Eleventh Annual Symposium, we are delighted to announce a keynote speaker who engages many of these themes in his work: Kevin Floyd, Associate Professor of English, Kent State University, author of The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

The journal Gender & History will again sponsor a prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the Symposium. Conference presenters will also have the opportunity to publish their work in the on-line proceedings volume. We possess limited resources to subsidize travel expenses for presenters. Giving priority to presenters with limited conference experience, we will allocate these funds based on the quality of presenters’ proposals and the availability of funds.

To submit a paper or panel by email (preferred method); please send only one attachment in Word or PDF format containing a 250-word abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae for each paper presenter, commentator, or panel chair to gendersymp at gmail dot com. The subject line of the email must read "Attn: Programming Committee.” We cannot be responsible for submissions that do not meet these conditions.

To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format, please send five (5) copies of all abstracts and curriculum vitae to: Programming Committee, Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History 309 Gregory Hall, MC 466, 810 S. Wright Street Urbana, Illinois 61801.

For more information, please contact Programming Committee Chair, T.J. Tallie at gendersymp at gmail dot com.

CFP: 1st Annual Student Interdisciplinary Conference (UIUC; 21 Dec; 4 Feb)

Yet another chance to get practice presenting your work in a low-key setting, and so close to home!






CALL FOR PROPOSALS, POSTERS, AND REVIEWERS
Organized by Graduate and Professional Affairs Committee, Illinois Student Senate
Co-Sponsored by the Provost Office

The Illini Union
Urbana, IL
February 04, 2008
A change in the way we do research, a change in the way we think

The University of Illinois will be hosting the 1st Annual Student Interdisciplinary Conference on February 4, 2008 at the Illini Union. This one-day event brings together graduate and undergraduate students from all disciplines including engineering, science, social science, humanities, education, fine arts, and beyond in an informal and supportive atmosphere where they can present their interdisciplinary work, network, discuss different points of view, and engage in conversations related to the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of such research methodologies. The conference will promote interdisciplinary research through two honored speakers, help graduate and undergraduate students build their social networks, and provide students an opportunity to meet with some of the leaders of interdisciplinary projects.

The conference invites original contributions in form of presentation/ poster session on:
· Creative Applications,
· Practical use case studies, and
· Completed or research in progress
that require cross-campus collaborations, interdisciplinary efforts, and innovative research methods for posters and presentations sessions. Examples of conference themes for proposal submission include but not limited to experience with interdisciplinary research, cross-disciplinary research, barriers to interdisciplinary research, and discussion on research, methods, and types of interdisciplinary research.

Graduate and Undergraduate Students are invited to submit applications electronically to mgolpar2@uiuc.edu
· For Poster Sessions:
o An abstract of 200 words for a poster session.
· For Presentation:
o An abstract of 200 words as well as a 2-page proposal for presentation.
See website for format information and templates.
· For the review of posters and proposals:
o A 2-page CV highlighting reviewing experience
(experience recommended but not required).
· For templates, examples, and further submission information, please visit www.iss.uiuc.edu/UISIC .

Accepted presentations and posters will be eligible for one of three best paper/poster awards, sponsored by the Office of the Provost.

Important dates are:
Proposals and Abstracts due December 21, 2007
Notification of Acceptance by January 14, 2008
Student Interdisciplinary Conference at the Illini Union February 4, 2008

For further information, contact mgolpar2@uiuc.edu or visit www.iss.uiuc.edu/UISIC.
If you believe that you may need accommodations due to any sort of special circumstances, please contact the conference committee so that appropriate arrangements can be made.

CFP: South Korea’s Education Exodus (Chogi yuhak): Risks, Realities, and Challenges (**31 Aug; 28-29 Mar; UIUC)

**Since I'm just now getting the announcement, I imagine they are resending it based on a low number of abstract submissions. If you're interested and just seeing this announcement for the first time, you might want to contact them and see if you can get an extra week or two.

South Korea’s Education Exodus (Chogi yuhak): Risks, Realities, and Challenges
A Working Conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
March 28-29, 2008

South Korean “early study abroad” students – namely those young people who exit South Korea for study prior to college – are literally changing the face of Korean diasporic communities across the U.S. and other English-speaking nations. Early study abroad is a rapidly escalating market in South Korea: a $550 million industry in the first quarter of 2004, doubling the 2002 figures. Remarkably, a recent South Korean survey revealed that if given the opportunity, 1 out of 4 parents would like to emigrate for their children’s education. The conference will ask large questions about South Korea’s particular globalization embrace, cosmopolitan desires, and education system; and about the changing face and social reality of Korean America with the arrival of these new immigrants. In doing so, the conference will take up both the macro-level context and consequences and the U.S. realities of this growing “immigrant” population.

We invite graduate students and faculty with sustained and substantive research programs on this topic to submit an abstract.

Deadline for Abstract Submission: August 31, 2007

Conference website:
http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/EducationExodus/index.html
E-mail: aasp@uiuc.edu

@UIUC: Transnational Seminars Fall Semester (Fridays @ 3 pm)

TRANSNATIONAL SEMINARS

SOCIOLOGY ● GEOGRAPHY ● CENTER GLOBAL STUDIES ● WOMEN AND GENDER IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ● GLOBAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION ● URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING




Every other Friday 3 pm (with variations)
Venue: Lincoln Hall 336 (Alt: Davenport 219)

Sept 7 Sociology Centennial

Sept 21
David Hess, Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Local First...But What Next? Globalization, regional development, and the localist movement
Respondent: Diana Mincyte, Advertising

Sept 28
Berch Berberoglu, University of Nevada, Reno
Dynamics of globalization and its impact on society in the 21st century
Respondent: Brian Dill, Sociology

Oct 12
Olga Sezneva, University of Chicago
Practicing memory and nostalgia
Michael Peters, Education

Oct 26
Davenport 219
Euan Hague, DePaul University
The Jefferson Davis Highway: A Confederate memorial landscape in Washington state
Respondent: David Wilson, Geography

Nov 9
Colin Flint, UIUC Geography
Transnationalism and just war: theoretical problems and soldier's words
Respondent: Ellen Moodie, Anthropology

Nov 30
Davenport 219
Roger Keil, York University, Geography
Old laws, new insights: urban research and action in the age of terror
Respondent: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sociology

Dec 14
William Brustein, UIUC, Associate Provost International Affairs
The socialism of fools: The leftist origins of modern anti-Semitism
Respondent: Emanuel Rota, Italian Studies

For info contact fall series coordinator Jan Nederveen Pieterse

@UIUC: Critical Theory Fall 2007 Seminar: "Affect Theory" (Monday Evenings)

The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is pleased to announced its fall 2007 criticism seminar on "Affect Theory." This non-credit seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students. Readings for each session will be available either through e-reserves (Unit 2007/Rothberg) or as hard copies through campus mail. If you are interested in being on the Unit's seminar mailing list and receiving announcements about the seminar, please respond to this message. If you are interested in receiving hard copies of the readings, please indicate that and include your campus address, including mail code.

Please feel free to forward this to any faculty or graduate students who you believe will be interested in taking part in any of our activities. I will be happy to answer any questions about the seminar.

Best wishes for the new semester,

Michael Rothberg


Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Seminar, Fall 2007: Affect Theory

Rage. Fear. Shame. Disgust. Love. Anxiety. Depression. Joy.

Why affect, why now? Fredric Jameson has claimed that we live in a time of “waning affect,” yet a growing number of scholars working within and across various disciplines have challenged this view. Especially since 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror,” affect has emerged as a key site of political mobilization and critical concern. Scholars such as Sianne Ngai in literary/cultural studies and Antonio Damasio in neuroscience are convinced that affect has anything but waned in our time and are now producing a formidable body of knowledge on a subject that was once considered too nebulous for serious study.

This Unit seminar approaches “affect theory” as an open and exciting interdisciplinary field—one that traverses both the humanities and the sciences. We will examine several questions related to affect theory and its rise. First and foremost, what is affect? How is it different from emotion, feeling, or passion? How does affect work across disciplines? Can we study affect historically? How are certain affects racialized or gendered? How do affects and affect-laden signs flow among bodies, human and non-human? How might one theorize a politics of terror and other affects? How do affects lend force to ideas and ideologies, to causes such as the anti-globalization movement or the recent surge of nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and other countries? Finally, what does affect bring to the study of theory and criticism? 

In conjunction with a Unit colloquium panel on “Affect Across the Disciplines” and a Unit-sponsored graduate student conference “Thinking Affect: Memory, Cognition, Language” (September 28-29), this seminar aims to create a space for dialogue among a wide range of disciplines, to address methodological concerns raised by affect theory, and to explore the political implications of affect.

Texts will be chosen from authors such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Antonio Damasio, Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi, Sianne Ngai, Phoebe Sengers, Eve Sedgwick, Ann Laura Stoler, and Sylvan Tomkins. Other texts will be added depending on the interests of the group.

For more information or to be included on the Affect Theory seminar mailing list, contact Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism (mpr@uiuc.edu).

Schedule

All meetings will take place on Monday evenings from 8:00 – 10:00 pm at the IPRH Building, 805 W. Pennsylvania, Urbana unless otherwise noted.

September 10: Introducing Affect Theory

Lawrence Grossberg, “Mapping Popular Culture,” We Gotta Get Out of This Place (69-87, 409-10)

Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Parables for the Virtual (23-45, plus notes)

Sianne Ngai, “Introduction,” Ugly Feelings (pp. 1-37, 357-61)



Tuesday, September 18, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm, Place TBA: Special Session with Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago)

Lauren Berlant, “Love, a Queer Feeling,” from Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane

Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” from differences



September 24: Affect and Cognition

Kirsten Boehner, Rogério DePaula, Paul Dourish, and Phoebe Sengers, “Affect: From Information to Interaction,” Proc. 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing (2005), 59-68.

Antonio Damassio, “Introduction” & “Emotions and Feelings,” Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (xi-xix, 127-64, 269-70, 282-5)

Otniel Dror, “Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers,” Social Research 68.2 (2001): 357-78.


Recommended:

Teresa Brennan, “The New Paradigm,” The Transmission of Affect (74-96, 182-88)



September 28-29: Thinking Affect: Memory, Language, and Cognition (Graduate Student Conference)


October 15: Shame, Fear, and the Politics of Affect

Sarah Ahmed, selection from The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, selection from Touching Feeling

Sylvan Tomkins, selection TBA



November 12: Historicizing Affect

William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72:1 (March 2000): 109-52

Other readings TBA

Recommended:

Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107:3 (June 2002): 821-45.


December 3: Affect Across the Disciplines: A Panel Discussion

8:00 pm, Levis Faculty Center

Samantha Frost, Political Science and Gender and Women's Studies

Justine Murison, English

Gabriel Solis, Music

Yasemin Yildiz, German

--
Michael Rothberg
Director, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Associate Professor, Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building, MC-718
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
telephone: (217) 333-2581
fax: (217) 333-4321

@UIUC: Critical Theory Lectures (Tues. Evenings Fall Semester)

Once again the Unit for Criticism will be offering its Tuesday evening lectures on
Modern Critical Theory. These lectures are intended to introduce graduate
students to some of the key texts that lie behind contemporary work in critical
theory and cultural studies. Lectures are open to all graduate students.

Thank you,
Michael Rothberg

The Modern Critical Theory lecture series

Fall 2007


All lectures are on Tuesday evenings, 7:30-9:00 pm, in English 160, unless
noted--starting 28 Aug. All readings, except for entire books (Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault,
Derrida), will be on e-reserves.

Note that a lot of EALC students have attended these lectures and found them useful. And even if you don't have time to read in advance you can still benefit from sitting in.


8/28: Kant: Michael Rothberg (Unit), Jim Hansen (English), and Robert Rushing
(Comp Lit)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen
Wood, "'B' Introduction"

Kant, Critique of Judgment (Introduction, Parts I-IV)

Kant, Critique of Judgment (selections in Norton)

Edmund Burke, “Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime”

Recommended: Frederick Beiser, "The Enlightenment and Idealism," from The
Cambridge Companion to German Idealism


9/4: Hegel: William Schroeder (Philosophy)

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Introduction, “Sense-
Certainty,” and “Self-Consciousness” [through “lordship and bondage”], pp.
46-66 & 104-119)


9/12: Nietzsche (WEDNESDAY, GREGORY HALL 223): Alexander Nehamas
(Philosophy, Princeton University)

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (book)


9/18: Freud: Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comp Lit)

Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” and selections from The Interpretation of Dreams
(Norton)
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (book)


9/25: Marxism: Jim Hansen (English)

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, selections from Norton

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (Norton)

Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of
Listening”


10/2: Structuralism: Michael Rothberg (English/Unit)

Readings by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes (only from Mythologies)
in Norton

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,”
Structural Anthropology

Louis Althusser, “Marx’s Immense Theoretical Revolution,” Reading Capital


10/9: Lacan, Althusser, Zizek: Robert Rushing (Italian/Comp Lit)

Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" & "The Agency of the Letter in the
Unconscious" (Norton)

Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (Norton)

Slavoj Zizek, "Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing," in The Metastases of Enjoyment
(pp. 89-112)

Slavoj Zizek, "How Did Marx Invent The Symptom?," in The Sublime Object of
Ideology (pp. 11-53)


10/16: Derrida: Bruce Rosenstock, Religious Studies

Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (book)


10/24: Foucault: (WEDNESDAY, in GREGORY HALL 223): Martin Jay, History
(University of California, Berkeley)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (book)


10/30: Feminism: Sarah Projansky (Gender and Women’s Studies/Cinema
Studies)

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1974).

Patricia Hill Collins, "Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated
Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought." Fighting Words: Black Women and the
Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 201-228.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, "Gender Systems: Toward a Theory of Human Sexuality."
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York:
Basic Books, 2000. 233-255.

Ella Shohat. "Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic
Studies, and Postcolonial Studies." Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 1-16.


11/6: Queer Theory: Martin Manalansan (Anthropology/Asian American Studies)

Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”

Cathy Cohen, "Punks, Bulldagger, and Welfare Queens: The Radical
Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ 3: 437-485.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic,” Epistemology of the Closet.
pp. 1-67.

Michael Warner, “Introduction” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and
Social Theory. pp. vii-xxxi

Secondary Readings:

John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity”

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Sections on biopower and
repressive hypothesis.

Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chapter 5,
“Role Models” pp 97-111

Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality”


11/13: Postcolonial Theory: Jed Esty (English)

Frantz Fanon, "The Negro and Recognition," from Black Skin, White Masks (pp
210-222)

Edward Said, “Introduction,” from Orientalism (Norton)

Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory” (Norton)

Gayatri Spivak, from Critique of Postcolonial Reason (pp. 112-140)

Secondary:
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” from Critical Inquiry (1991)


For more information, contact Michael Rothberg or consult the
Unit for Criticism website: criticism.english.uiuc.edu

CFP: Ninth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History (6-8 Mar.; 1 Nov.; UIUC)

Last year EALC had more grad students presenting at this conference than any other department! Let's do it again. This is a great chance to get experience presenting at a conference as long as you can put a historical spin on your work--even if you aren't technically doing "history." And they welcome individual proposals so there's no need to put together a panel. Don't miss this chance.

The Ninth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
March 6-8 , 2008; Submission Deadline: November 1, 2007

The Executive Committee of the Ninth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce a call for papers. The Symposium, which is the capstone event of the History Department's Women's History month celebration, is scheduled for March 6-8, 2008. To celebrate and encourage further work in the field of women's and gender history, we invite submissions from graduate students from any institution and discipline. The Symposium organizers welcome individual papers on any topic in the field of women's and gender history; papers submitted as a panel will be judged individually. Preference will be given to scholars who did not present at last year's Symposium.

This year's theme, "Contentious Voices," incorporates a variety of trends shaping the field of women's and gender history. We welcome paper or panel submissions that analyze the state of the field, particularly those that problematize it or suggest new avenues of inquiry. We are especially interested in papers that engage with the intersections between women's and gender history and sexuality studies, and address such themes as race, religion, dissent, discipline and embodiment from a range of methodological vantage points, including queer theory, black feminist thought, transnational/post-colonial thought, the social sciences and humanities. We also are interested in assembling a geographically and temporally diverse body of papers; exciting proposals could focus on, but would not be limited to, topics ranging from queer temporalities and identities, to gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages or Non-West, as well as gendered analyzed through South-South comparisons.

For this year's Symposium, we are delighted to announce two plenary speakers who engage many of these themes in their work:

Saidiya Hartman (Professor of African American and American Literature - Columbia University)
Sara Ahmed (Professor in Race and Cultural Studies - Goldsmiths, University of London)
The journal Gender & History will again sponsor a prize for the best graduate student paper presented at the Symposium. Conference presenters will also have the opportunity to publish their work in the on-line proceedings volume.

We possess limited resources to subsidize travel expenses for presenters. Giving priority to presenters with limited conference experience, we will allocate these funds based on the quality of presenters' proposals and the availability of funds.

All submissions must be received by November 1, 2007. To submit a paper or panel in a hard copy format (preferred method), please send five (5) copies of a 250-word abstract AND a one-page curriculum vitae for EACH paper presenter, commentator, or panel chair to:

Programming Committee
Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History
309 Gregory Hall, MC 466
810 South Wright Street
Urbana, Illinois 61801

To submit a paper or panel by email, please send ONLY ONE attachment in Word format containing all abstracts and curriculum vitae. The subject line of the email must read "Attn: Programming Committee" and should be sent gendersymp@gmail.com. We cannot be responsible for submissions that do not meet these conditions.

For more information, please contact Programming Committee Chairs, Carmen Thompson or Jacob Baum at gendersymp@gmail.com.

fyi: FLB to become School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics

It's official...

Board expands programs of study available to University students - News: "The [Illinois Board of Higher Education] ... approved a University school of literatures, cultures and linguistics which will offer more than 30 languages associated with literature and cultures, and a permanent Technology and Entrepreneur Center.

The school of literatures, cultures and linguistics will bring together the departments of classics, East Asian languages and cultures, French, Germanic languages and literatures, linguistics, Slavic languages and literatures, and Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

It will also house the comparative and world literature program, the study of religion program, the division of English as an international language and the unit for cinema studies. "

@UIUC: Globalization, Culture and Self (w/ EALC presenters) (1 May; 2090B FLB)

In case you missed this in the EAPS Weekly Bulletin, next week Leona and Sangsook are presenting papers from a seminar called "Globalization, Culture and Self."

---
Tuesday, May 1
Globalization, Culture and Self
12-2 pm Room 2090B FLB

CY CHIU, Poshek FU and Freeman Fellows Keli DIAO, Huixia LIU, Wensong LIU, Sufeng SONG, Volette WANG, Zhi-Xue ZHANG announce a noontime presentation of student work from their spring seminar "Globalization, Culture and Self."

This course engaged scholarships from different humanity and social science disciplines for the purpose of exploring important historical and cultural issues facing Greater China ( i.e., China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia) today. The goal of this course was not to provide answers to the questions, but to question the answers. The goal was for this learning process to broaden and deepen inquiry into the intricate interrelations of globalization, culture, and the self in Greater China.

Presenters:
Leona Middleton: Japanese television dramas and identity formation in Chinese communities
Grace Yan: Representations of Chinese Landscapes in Beijing 2008 Olympic Campaign
Melody Chao: Model minority: A media-nurtured stereotype
Eric Dalle: Positioning identities: Shan Sa's The Girl Who Played Go and the Sino-Francophone
Dong Han: Copyright and freedom of expression in China
Emily Johns: Female arts in contemporary China
Sangsook Lee-Chung: Changing Perspectives of Chinese Diaspora and Chinese Identity
Michael Parris: Ways of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love

@UIUC: Women Out/In Japan: Photos from the 9 April Performance

Here are some pics from the performance on Monday for those of you who made it and those who weren't able to. It was quite the experience and led to a great discussion afterward.

@UIUC: Women Out/In Japan: Performance and Roundtable Discussion

Don't miss this exciting event here on campus!

Feminist performance artist Tari Ito and jazz musician SwingMasa will perform "Rubber Tit" in the Heritage Room at ACES Library (the octagonal building on the south quad) on Monday 9 April at 4:00. The performance will be followed by Q&A with the performers and then a roundtable discussion on female genders and sexualities in Japan with the performers as well as Elise Edwards of Butler University, our own Karen Kelsy (Head, EALC) and James Welker (PhD student, EALC).

Graduate students wishing to join Tari-san and Masa-san for lunch on Monday should contact James.



SwingMasa’s Reflections on Her Performance:

What it means to be “me” and the message of my jazz music, “Don’t Kill”:
My performance is for the recovery of “myself,” the me that is shrinking in this era of backlash and the rise of conservatism.

Tari Ito’s Reflections on Her Performance:

In the course of my daily life in Tokyo, I must face both the entrenched sexism and compulsory heterosexuality of this society. Even as I act with the hope of contributing to the visibility of lesbians, ultimately I cannot escape the feeling that I am being ignored. So—positively and with a big heart—I choose to toy with a giant rubber tit. I choose to pursue my sexual fantasies to my heart’s content. I chose the tit—a part of the body possessing a dangerous universality—with a consciousness of tits being something everyone is able to express strong feelings about, of tits being very political.

@UIUC: Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History (8-10 Mar)

Next Thurs-Sat. will be the Eighth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History here on campus at the Levis Faculty Center. Four EALC students will be presenting papers and two additional students will be there as respondents. There are a few additional papers dealing with Chinese history. It would be great if you could attend some of these sessions.

All panel sessions are free and open to the public. Although there will be registration, I’ve been assured you do not need to register.

Here are the panels with EALC students and below is the complete schedule with EALC students and East Asia-related panels highlighted:

Thursday, March 8
1:00-2:30
Gendered Beliefs and Religious Experience
Room 402, Session 1
“Hermaphrodite Shaman: Understanding Female-Male Shaman Combination in Japanese Shamanism”
Yeonjoo Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“‘New Kamakura Buddhism’ Revisited: The Putative Transition in Dōgen’s Thought and the Question of its Subsequent Effect on Female Religious Practices within Soto Zen”
Brandon Pieczko, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Commentator: Joshua Herr, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC

Friday, March 9
10:15-11:45
Consuming Women/Women Consuming
Music Room, Session 5.2
Commentator: Hui Xiao, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC

1:40-3:10
Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Women
Room 402, Session 7.1
“Inscribing a Japanese Lesbian Community: Transnational Flows, Historical Roots, and Local Lives”
James Welker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


1:40-3:00
Teaching Gender, Disciplining Bodies
Music Room, Session 7.2
“‘Recuperating the National Body’: Intersections of Gender and Race in Imperial Japan”
Rebecca Nickerson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign




--------------------
Eighth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


March 8-10, 2007

Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois Street, Urbana



Thursday, March 8

1:00-2:30
Gendered Beliefs and Religious Experience
Room 402, Session 1

Chair: Professor Ken Cuno, History, UIUC

“The American Muslim Challenge to Traditional Gender Norms in Their Faith Communities”
Mahruq F. Khan, Loyola University Chicago

“Hermaphrodite Shaman: Understanding Female-Male Shaman Combination in Japanese Shamanism”
Yeonjoo Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“‘New Kamakura Buddhism’ Revisited: The Putative Transition in Dōgen’s Thought and the Question of its Subsequent Effect on Female Religious Practices within Sōtō Zen”
Brandon Pieczko, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“An Enduring Sisterhood: Modern American Women Who Convert to Islam and Their Relationship to Muslim Women of the Past”
Joy Schulz, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Commentator: Joshua Herr, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC

2:45-4:15
Body Politics in the Longue Durée
Room 402, Session 2

Chair: Professor Samantha Frost, Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies, UIUC

“The Original Tribade: The Roman Poet Martial’s Phallic Woman as Social Power”
Laura Van Abbema, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Obscenity, Re-placed Gender and the Imagery of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, MS Hunter 252”
Elise Boneau, Western Michigan University

“‘Her Eyes are Sunk into Her Head, God Bless Us From Her’: The Image of the Old Witch in Early Modern England”
Gina Martino, Minnesota State University, Mankato

“‘A Certain Amount of Prudishness’: Making a Legal Space for American Nudism, 1947-58”
Brian Hoffman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Commentator: Jennifer Edwards, History, UIUC

4:30-6:00
Marital Relation(ship)s
Room 402, Session 3

Chair: Professor Elizabeth Pleck, History, UIUC

“The Other’s Representation in the Family Organization: Married Women’s Relationships with Natal Families in Qing and Republican China”
Chia-Lan Chang, University of Southern California

“Subverting Women’s Traditional Sources of Power and Autonomy: An Essay on the Cultural Dynamics of Female Genital Mutilation in Africa”
Christophe Dongmo, Vanderbilt University

“Drawing the Curtain: Placing the Issue of Marital Rape in the American Woman’s Movement, 1860-1890”
Phyllis Thompson Reid, Harvard University

Commentator: Amanda Brian, History, UIUC

Plenary Address – 7:00
“Modern Girls in Early-Twentieth-Century China”
Tze-lan Deborah Sang
Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures University of Oregon
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana
Reception sponsored by Gender & History, to follow in the Spurlock Museum Atrium

In this talk Professor Sang examines the Chinese modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s, a chameleon-like figure that appeared in a wide variety of representations. In particular, she explores how the modern girl image became inflected when it passed from both modernist and elite leftist discourses into middle-brow fiction. She argues that whereas the bourgeois modern girl was by turns glamorized and abjected, stories of lower-class “failed modern girls” were full of pathos and ambiguous class ideology.


Friday, March 9

8:30-10:00
Heroes and Heroines? War and Gender
Room 402, Session 4.1

Chair: Professor Dana Rabin, History, UIUC

“The ‘New Man’ that Women Helped Create: Negotiating Masculinity in the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1975”
Johanna I. Moya Fábregas, Indiana University, Bloomington

“Heroic Masculinity: Rite of Passage, Homoeroticism and Martyrdom in Basque Falangist Narrative during the Spanish Civil War"
Iker González-Allende, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“‘To the Front, From the Women of the USSR’: Necessity, Ideology and Gender in the Soviet War Effort”
Steven Jug, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Masculinities and the Soldiers in Revolt: The Fall of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1968-1973”
Martin Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Commentator: Ashley Howard, History, UIUC

8:30-10:00
Re-forming the Public
Music Room, Session 4.2

Chair: Professor Carol Symes, History, UIUC

“Fighting Shirley Chisholm: Discourses of Race and Gender in U.S Politics”
Yveline Alexis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Androgyny and the Urban Landscape: Lesbian Gender and the Creation of Homosexual Community in Chicago”
Melanie Beaudette, Loyola University Chicago

“Unruly Women, Uneasy Men: Gendered Reactions to the Johnson-Jeffries Prizefight of 1910”
Shannon Smith Bennett, Indiana University, Bloomington

“Thucydides 2.45.2 and the Rhetoric of Female Exclusion”
Irene Peirano, Harvard University

Commentator: Kwame Holmes, History, UIUC

10:15-11:45
Media(ting) Gender
Room 402, Session 5. 1

Chair: Professor Tamara Matheson, History, UIUC

“‘I Can’t Bear to See Ms. Getting More and More like a Yuppie, Post-Feminist Rag’: The Feminist Movement, Media and Decline”
Diana Cucuz, McMaster University

“Lock ‘Em Up or Throw ‘Em Out: Race, Gender and the Welfare State in the Bone Thugs in Harmony Video ‘1st of Tha Month’”
Clare Daniel, University of New Mexico

“Patriarchal Perceptions of Women Workers in West Virginia Socialist Newspapers 1910-1920: A Movement Contaminated by the Overlying Social Schema”
Joseph Key, Marshall University

“‘Tonight the Quaker Girl Turns Modern’: The Philadelphia Club of Advertising Women’s Gendered Depictions of the Past, 1916-1939”
Emily Westkaemper, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Commentator: Lise Mae Schlosser, English, Northern Illinois University

10:15-11:45
Consuming Women/Women Consuming
Music Room, Session 5.2

Chair: Professor Clare Crowston, History, UIUC

“Spice Girls: Cooking in Antebellum Boston”
Aniruddha Bose, Boston College

“An Easily Understood Problem: The Passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974)”
Lawrence Bowdish, The Ohio State University

“‘Fashion Favors the Mother-To-Be’: Maternity Clothes and the Changing Perceptions of Pregnancy in America from the 1910s to the 1960s in America”
Cheryl Lemus, Northern Illinois University

“Myth and Modernity in Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette (Gitane à la Cigarette), 1862”
Rozanne Stringer, University of Kansas

Commentator: Hui Xiao, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC


1:40-3:10
Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Women
Room 402, Session 7.1

Chair: Professor Alejandro Lugo, Anthropology, UIUC

“The Irish Ladies’ Land League in the United States: Gender, Class, and Ethnic Nationalism in the Gilded Age”
Ely M. Janis, Boston College

“Women without Race: Japanese War Brides in the Postwar Era”
Angela Tudico, University of Maryland

“How the International Women’s Movement Discovered the ‘Troubles’: Transnational Encounters against the Background of the Northern Ireland Conflict during the 1970s”
Janou Vorderwuelbecke, European University Institute

“Inscribing a Japanese Lesbian Community: Transnational Flows, Historical Roots, and Local Lives”
James Welker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Commentator: Brandon Mills, History, UIUC

1:40-3:00
Teaching Gender, Disciplining Bodies
Music Room, Session 7.2

Chair: Professor Cris Mayo, Educational Policy Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies, UIUC

“Schools of Sex: Competition over the Education of Girls in Colonial Zanzibar”
Corrie R. Decker, University of California, Berkeley

“‘Recuperating the National Body’: Intersections of Gender and Race in Imperial Japan”
Rebecca Nickerson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Chhadi Lage Chham Chham Vidya Yeyi Gham Gham (The harder the stick beats, the faster the flow of knowledge): Dalit Women’s Struggle for Education”
Shailaja Paik, Emory University and University of Warwick

Commentator: Rebecca McNulty Schreiber, History, UIUC

Tea & Coffee – 3:00-4:00

Plenary Address – 4:00
“Cover Up: French Gender Equality and Islamic Headscarves”
Joan W. Scott
Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Levis Faculty Center, 3rd Floor
Reception from 6:00 to 8:00, Levis Faculty Center, 1st Floor

When the French government passed a law banning Islamic headscarves in public schools, one of the justifications for it was that it would guarantee the equality of women. Professor Scott’s talk will critically examine that justification. She will suggest that we need to reexamine universal ideas of women’s emancipation and the political uses to which they are put.


Saturday, March 10
Coffee and Pastries – 8:00-8:30

8:30-10:00
Geographies of Resistance, Part I
Room 402, Session 8
(Note: This panel is “linked” to the panel in Session 9; attendance at both panels is highly encouraged, but not required.)

Chair: Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, History and Sociology, UIUC

“Women of Algiers: Music as a Strategy of Sublimating the Post-Independence Trauma”
Nicola C. Dach, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Los Homosexuales Speak: Love, Modernity, and Identity in 1980s Uruguay”
Ryan M. Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Tales of Hulan River: Xiao Hong’s Writings of Homelessness and Critique of the Nation in 1930s China”
Chunchun Ting, University of Chicago

“Women and Resistance in Huntington, West Virginia’s Glass Industry”
Ginny Young, Marshall University

Commentator: Gregory Kveberg, History, UIUC

10:15-11:45
Geographies of Resistance, Part II
Room 402, Session 9
(Note: This panel is “linked” to the panel in Session 8; attendance at both panels is highly encouraged, but not required.)

Chair: TBA

“Ladies in Red: Women, Communism, and Labor Unions in Early Twentieth Century Bombay”
Rachel Ball, Boston College

“Women’s Liberation and Revolutionary Bodies in Modern China: A Reconsideration”
Anup Grewal, University of Chicago

“Making the YWCA Relevant: Black Women’s Impact on the Interracial Practice of the Milwaukee YWCA, 1940s-1970s”
Crystal Moten, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Commentator: Diana Georgescu, History, UIUC

1:15-2:45
The Politics of Reproduction
Room 402, Session 10.1

Chair: Professor Ruth Nicole Brown, Gender & Women’s Studies, UIUC

“The ‘Desiring Girl’ and Negotiations of Sexual Normativity in Hillbilly Marriage Scandals”
Ryan Cartwright, University of Minnesota

“A ‘Tremendous and Heart-Sickening Operation’: The Embryotomy and Conceptualization of Fetal Life in Nineteenth-Century Medical Literature”
Kathleen King, Purdue University

“‘Dey Swapped my Grandmother Away’: Enslaved Women and Reproduction in the Antebellum South”
Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of California, Los Angeles

“Justice Triumphant, 1731: Prints of Sodomites in the Dutch Republic and Gender Performance Pollution”
Maureen Warren, University of Kansas

Commentator: Michelle Kleehammer, History, UIUC

1:15-2:45
Other Citizens: Gendered Relationships to the State
Music Room, Session 10.2

Chair: Professor Lynne Curry, History, Eastern Illinois University

“‘Ghetto Guerillas’: African-American Vietnam Veterans and White Fears of Violence, 1965-1972”
Charlotte Cahill, Northwestern University

“Neocons are No ‘Sissies’: Reconstructing American Jewish Masculinity in the 1960s”
Ronnie Grinberg, Northwestern University

“‘Publicity Means Opposition’: Conflicts between Local, State-Wide and National Suffrage Organizing Tactics in the Ohio Suffrage Campaign of 1914”
Jessica Pliley, The Ohio State University

Commentator: Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, History, UIUC

3:00-4:30
The Life of an Article: Publishing in an Academic Journal
Featured Roundtable Hosted by the Journal of Women’s History
Music Room, Session 11

Panelists:
Professor Antoinette Burton, UIUC, Co-Editor (with Professor Jean Allman, UIUC)
Professor Marilyn Booth, UIUC, Book Review Editor
Amanda Brian, UIUC, Managing Editor
Sandra Henderson, UIUC, Managing Editor
James Warren, UIUC, Managing Editor

During this roundtable session, members of the editorial staff of the Journal of Women’s History, based at the University of Illinois, will discuss the editorial process and answer questions regarding the preparation, review, and publication of academic journal articles.

$$$: Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Research Studentships (11 Apr; summer 2007)

, ... just stumbled across this and it looks like it might be relevant to some....

Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Research Studentships
4/11/2007

Departmental Nomination Required

WUN is an international alliance of 16 institutions that have created a research and education partnership to generate significant advances in knowledge and understanding. The current WUN member institutions include institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands, and China. A full listing of the member institutions can be found at www.wun.ac.uk.

The University of Illinois WUN Research Studentship is intended to provide our graduate students the opportunity to participate in a short-term research experience (one to three months) with a faculty member at a WUN institution outside the United States. The proposed experience should enhance the research capabilities of the graduate student, and help develop international collaborative links for the faculty and institutions in one of the following fields: Bioinformatics; Earth Sciences; Geographical Information Science; Geography of the New Economy; Information Science; Medieval Studies; Nanotechnology; Nuclear Science; Nursing; Public Policy and Management; or Smart Materials.

Eligibility: Applicants must be full-time, registered University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate students in good academic standing in one of the disciplines listed above.

Terms and Conditions: The studentship award provides reimbursement of up to $1,000 for roundtrip transportation from Urbana-Champaign to the host institution. The award also provides a living stipend of $2,000 per month during the award period. Two- and three-month awards may qualify for a waiver of tuition and select fees as well as basic dental and vision coverage during the tenure of the award. Please note that awardees are required to purchase CISI health insurance from the Study Abroad Office for the time period abroad. A one-page report must be submitted to the department and the Graduate College by the awardee no later than one month after returning to Urbana-Champaign. Students are expected to comply with relevant University travel policies.

Nomination Procedure:

Departments are invited to nominate outstanding graduate students by forwarding three copies of the following materials to the Graduate College Fellowship Office, 209 Coble Hall, MC-322 by the deadline:

Graduate College Rating Form, including the signature of the unit executive officer or graduate program director.
Student's proposal, outlining the specific goals for the research experience including proposed dates of research. The proposal should not exceed 2 pages, and should be double-spaced, font size 12.
Student's current transcript.
Student's CV.

Support letter from student's adviser, specifically addressing the nature of the related research interests of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty member and student with the faculty researcher at the host institution.
Support letter from faculty member at the host institution indicating an endorsement of the student's goals for the research experience and a commitment to providing the supervision. The letter must also verify that the host institution will waive any tuition and bench fees.

Support statement from the administrative contact at the host institution. The two signed support letters from the host institution may be submitted to the student's department via mail, electronic mail or fax.
For more information, please contact the Graduate College Fellowship Office at (217) 333-0036 or gradfellowships@uiuc.edu. Late or incomplete files will not be considered.

For more information on WUN, visit the website at www.wun.ac.uk.

Deadline: April 11, 2007 for nominations of students with proposals to commence travel between May 1 and August 31, 2007.

Other: East Asia Ethnography Dissertation Workshop (2 Mar; 4-5 May; Urbana)

East AsiaEthnography Dissertation Workshop
May 4-5, 2007
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Universityof Illinois Urbana-Champaignand Indiana University Title VI National Resource Center Consortium (IL/IN NRC Consortium) announces a summer dissertation workshop in the field of East Asian Ethnography and invites applications from doctoral students in anthropology or other related disciplines who are writing ethnography-based dissertations.

This workshop is designed to enable students just beginning to write or those who are more advanced in their writing to engage in intensive discussions with faculty and each other. Possibilities for creating continuing networks among interested students and faculty will also be explored. Each student will be given time to present a chapter from his/her work in progress, and faculty members will then respond to the presentation.

The workshop will begin after breakfast on Friday, May 4 and conclude at noonon Saturday, May 5. Eight students will be selected for participation, and they will be mentored at the workshop by three faculty from the Consortium universities: Dr. Roger Janelli, Professor, folklore and ethnomusicology, IndianaUniversity; Dr. Sara Friedman, Assistant Professor, anthropology, IndianaUniversity, and Dr. Karen Kelsky, associate professor, anthropology and EALC, Universityof Illinois.

All application materials must be received by Friday, March 2, 2007. The application consists of two items: 1) a current CV, and 2) an 8-10 page double-spaced dissertation proposal or an 8-10 page excerpt from the dissertation in progress. Participants will be selected on the basis of their submitted materials and the potential for useful exchanges among them. Selected participants will submit the chapter or other excerpt to be examined at the Workshop no later than April 15, 2007. The Consortium will cover transportation costs (maximum $500) to Champaign, ILas well as housing for two nights and meals.

Submit application materials to:
IL/IN Consortium 2007 Summer Dissertation Workshop
Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
230 International Studies Building
910 S. Fifth St.
Champaign, IL 61820

Questions may be directed to Anne Prescott, Associate Director, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (EAPS), 217-244-4601; aprescot@uiuc.edu.

FACULTY BIOS
Sara Friedman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at IndianaUniversity. She received her Ph.D. from CornellUniversity. Courses taught include Cross-Cultural Gender Formations, China Through Anthropological Eyes, The Anthropology of Citizenship, and Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. She was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University and received a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women s Studies. Her research interests include marriage and the state, gender and sexuality, kinship, media and representation, transnationalism, tourism, and language politics. Recent major publications include Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China, forthcoming, Harvard University Press; “Embodying Civility: Civilizing Processes and Symbolic Citizenship in Southeastern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 63:3(2004); and “Spoken Pleasures and Dangerous Desires: Sexuality, Marriage, and the State in Rural Southeastern China,” East Asia, special issue: East Asian Sexualities, Louisa Schein, ed. 18:4 (2000).

Roger Janelli is Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at IndianaUniversity. He received his Ph.D. from the Universityof Pennsylvania. Courses taught include Korean Folklore, East Asian Folklore and Ethnography, and Folk Belief and Popular Religion. He has been honored as a Research Fellow, TokyoUniversityand Visiting Research Professor, YonseiUniversity. His research interests include Korean culture and social organization, East Asian ethnography, religion, political economy, and responses to globalization in East Asia. Recent major publications include "Transforming Filial Piety in South Korea," in Filial Piety in Contemporary East Asia with Dawnhee Yim, Charlotte Ikels, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003; "Gender Construction in the Offices of a South Korean Conglomerate," in Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, with Dawnhee Yim, Laurel Kendall, ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press; The Anthropology of Korea: East Asian Perspectives. Senri Ethnological Series, No. 49. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, Coedited with Shima Mutshuhiko; 1993, "Toward a Political Economy of Korean Shamanism," with Yim Suk-jay and Dawnhee Yim, in Shamans and Cultures, Mihaly Hoppal and Keith Howard, eds. Budapest: Akadamiai Kiado, and Los Angeles: International Society for Transoceanic Research; and Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate, with Dawnhee Yim, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Karen Kelsky is Associate Professor of EALC and Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii. Her research interests includecontemporary Japanese culture, transnational social movements, Japanese alternative communities, gender, and race. Her work to date has focused on transnational cultural politics of gender and racial identity in Japan. Her first book, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Duke, 2001), concerned the gender politics of Japan's "internationalization." Projects in progress are a book entitled Alternative Japan: The Global Life and Times of the Japanese New Age Counterculture on the emergence and contemporary activities of the postwar beatnik, hippie, new age and environmentalist/antiwar counterculture in Japan, and an exploration of queer Japan and the lesbian and FTM urban subcultures in Tokyo and Osaka.

Talk: (re)claiming the lost object: the construction of screen memories in Tsai Ming-liang’s films

a talk by
E.K. Tan

Thursday, Jan. 25
Lucy Ellis Lounge
1080 FLB
5:10-6:40 PM



This presentation examines how internationally acclaimed Malaysian-Chinese
director Tsai Ming-liang’s films, The Hole (1997), What Time is it There? (2001),
and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) adopts the genres of musical, French New
Wave, and martial arts to denaturalize narrative coherence and arouse the
audience’s curiosity in locating the significance of these indifferent forms to the
films’ overall presentation. As a result, the presentation posits that Tsai casts
denaturalizing objects such as Chinese musicals from the sixties, Truffaut’s The
400 Blows and martial arts classic Dragon Inn as screen memories to distort and
disguise the anxiety of rootlessness experienced by the director, a culturally-
displaced Chinese diasporic filmmaker. The casting of these screen memories is
on the one hand the screening of metonymical links for the audience; while, on
the other, the screening of the origin of past memories from the audience.

EK Tan is a graduate student in the Program for Comparative and World
Literature, where he works on modern Chinese literature, Asian American
studies, Southeast Asian studies, postcolonial theory, diaspora, psychoanalysis
and film theory. He is currently finishing his dissertation, entitled I Write
Therefore I Am: Aestheticization of Loss and Displacement in the Literary and
Cinematic Works of Southeast Asian Chinese Diasporas.

CFP: Competing Modernities (31 Jan; 27-28 Apr; UIUC)

Competing Modernities
April 27 – 28, 2007
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The IPRH reading group, British Modernities, in conjunction with Irish Studies
and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, would like to encourage
submissions for our annual graduate student conference. We invite students
from a wide variety of disciplines to submit proposals pertaining to our
conference theme, “Competing Modernities.”

From “alternative modernities” to “a singular modernity,” concepts of modernity
have acquired crucial relevance in recent scholarship. With careful attention to
temporal and geopolitical contingencies, we hope to encourage cross-
disciplinary debate over the stakes of constructing modernities. Together, we
plan to investigate how each era articulates its own relation to the concept of
modernity and registers its own specific claim or resistance to being “modern.”

This year’s keynote speaker, Jules Law, is from the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He has published numerous
articles on Hardy, George Eliot, Joyce, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. His first book,
The Rhetoric of Empiricism, examines the metaphors of reflection, surface, and
depth in philosophy, literary criticism, and art criticism from the eighteenth to
the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book entitled The Secret Life
of Fluids: Body, Space, and Social Control in the Victorian Novel.

We welcome papers that consider the following topics or others in relationship
to “modernities”:

ß Colonialism, imperialism, or Empire
ß capitalist modernity
ß science & technology
ß art & literature
ß aesthetic modernity
ß gendering modernity
ß cosmopolitanisms
ß religion & faith
ß the nation & nation-state
ß sex & sexuality
ß queer modernities
ß revolution
ß historicisms & historiography
ß transatlanticism

Please send 250-word abstracts for individual 20-minute papers to
modernities@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is January 20, 2007.
Accepted applicants will be notified by January 31, 2007. In the body of the e-
mail, please include the following information:

Name:
Departmental affiliation(s):
Level of graduate study:
Title of paper:
Contact information:

Participants whose abstracts are selected will be asked to submit full papers by
April 9, 2007.

FYI: Graduate employees hold rally for higher pay

News-Gazette, Thursday December 7, 2006
By Christine Des Garennes

With temperatures hovering around freezing and less than a week to go before final exams begin, University of Illinois graduate employees took a break from studying and grading Wednesday to rally on campus for higher pay.

The Graduate Employees' Organization and the UI have been negotiating for a new contract since April. Several rallies and more than a dozen bargain sessions later, the two sides are still in discussions. Recently, tensions rose between the UI and the union when they started negotiating wages.

The current minimum graduate stipend – the salary a graduate student earns as a research assistant or teaching assistant – is $12,220. [...] Under the current UI proposal, the stipend would rise by 2.5 percent to $12,586 for 2006-2007. For 2007-2008, assistants would make a minimum of $12,963 and in 2008-2009 the minimum would increase to $13,354.

But that's not enough to cover the rising costs of living for a student, said union members.

[...] "Our own minimum stipend doesn't meet the published figures (by the UI's Office of Admissions and Records) for what it takes to live in Champaign-Urbana," Simeone said.

According to that office's Web site, graduate student expenses average close to $14,000 a year in Champaign-Urbana for room, board and other living expenses.

Also at issue are health care costs and the other student fees the graduate employees pay the university. [...]

The health care premium for a graduate employee is $256 per semester or $756 a year. But add a spouse and children to the plan, and graduate employees could spend more than $1,000 per semester for health coverage.

"For some students it's more cost effective to fly back to their home country to receive care there, and that includes the cost of airfare," Simeone said. [...]

The next bargaining session is scheduled for Dec. 13.

"We have an outstanding offer and have been waiting four weeks for a response. We're hoping for a response at that meeting," Kaler said of Dec. 13.

If there is no settlement soon, the two sides can request federal mediation. [...]

Find the rest of this article here.

FYI: Graduate employees, University continue to negotiate earnings

Daily Illini
Drake Baer, Posted: 11/29/06

The University and the Graduate Employees Organization are in continuing negotiations over the issues of earnings and insurance for teaching assistants and graduate students.

[...] He said that the remaining issues to be resolved are also perhaps the most important. The proposal made by the University was a three-year contract with increases to stipends in each of three years and changes made to the insurance plan.

The proposed graduate employee minimum salary rate for teaching assistants and graduate assistants, on average, was a $12,586 annualized salary or a 2.5 percent increase, whichever is greater, each year. [...] "Graduate students are also getting a fee waiver, $12,500 added to the tuition fee waiver. It's a pretty good deal," Veazie said.

Others seem to disagree.

[...] Brian Dolber, graduate student, said that the University has come across "as a completely disrespectful institution that doesn't care about students or employees but only care about their bottom line."

The GEO is not ignoring what the University has put on the table, but they are keeping things in "financial perspective," Simeone added.

[...] "We don't want to talk about any wage deduction as a raise until it is a raise over the cost of inflation. Any raise under the rate of 3.6 percent isn't really a raise," Simeone said.

[...] Veazie said that the University is ready to settle on a fair contract for graduate students and that they are frustrated by the delay, referring to the four-week break between meetings.

The University's negotiating team has "repeatedly stalled and delayed" in regard to issues such as health care and wages, Dolber said.

This is not the absolute final configuration of the contract, but it's close to that, Veazie said. He said that if the union wants "a lot more," then the next step would be mediation.

"The next step for both parties is to listen. We're happy that the University wants to settle sooner rather than later, but we won't settle for anything that's unfair," Simeone said.

The next meeting will be held Dec. 13.

The full article can be found here

FYI: Adjuct (Part-time) Faculty Not Satisfied with Working Conditions

Adjuncts Forgotten Amidst Grad Student Negotiations
Drake Baer, Daily Illini, 11/3/06

There have been ongoing negotiations between the University and graduate employees in an effort to come up with a fair and equitable contract for both sides. The graduate employees are organized and have made their presence known through demonstrations all over campus. However, another group of academic professionals has not received that recognition - adjunct faculty members.

The benefits, pay, and working conditions vary greatly amongst different members of University faculty because not every instructor at the University is full time. Adjunct faculty do not have the guaranteed work that their full-time colleagues receive. ...

"The situation varies from whole year, multi-year, to (contracts that are) per course and per hour, really the academic equivalent of day labor," he said. ...

Many adjuncts have more than one teaching job at a time, and most work for multiple institutes, especially in major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Berry said. University of Illinois-Chicago has 1,112 part-time faculty members, whereas the Urbana campus has 850 part-time faculty, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

"Our teaching conditions are the students' learning conditions," Berry said. ...

He said that an adjunct will earn from $600 to $1200 a course at an average institution (but significantly higher at the University).

"You can't live on that," Higbie said. ... "How long can you carry on the University's principles when you're exploiting certain sections of your workforce?" ... Higbie said that the University should be a "model employer," and not simply follow what corporations are doing.

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