East Asian Research Society (EARS)

East Asian Research Society, organized in mid-2003, is designed to bring together interdisciplinary NU and local faculty with active research interests in East Asia to learn about each others latest work, and to interact with others who share common professional interests.At present, there is not institutional infrastructure to support Asianist work at NU or to foster intellectual interchange. In particular, there is no venue to present our own work-in-progress to a specialist audience, capable of engaging the material at the level of our intended audiences. This is a particular problem for junior faculty, who need to maintain a fairly rapid publication schedule to secure tenure.

Given this goal, there is no single set theme for the EARS group. Nonetheless, themes likely to emerge, given the research interests of the individuals involved, include 1) the cultural meanings of fashion and fine art, 2) East Asian intellectual traditions in legal, economic, and religious thought, and 3) the power struggle between the center and the periphery in East Asian States. A special focus will be the use of social science insights to think about humanities and humanities to think about social science in the East Asian context. So for example, the first reading was a chapter on the beauty industry from Laura Miller’s forthcoming book on the cultural meanings of beauty and fashion in contemporary Japan. Miller is a cultural anthropologist but two other members of the group (Hein and Moriguchi) have written industry studies from an economic perspective, and so were able to provide valuable suggestions from perspectives other than cultural anthropology.

Members:
Mark Bradley U.S. International and Vietnamese History, Associate Professor
Peter Carroll Chinese History, Assistant Professor
Sarah Fraser East Asian Art History, Associate Professor
Laura Hein Japanese History, Associate Professor
Melissa Macauley Chinese History Associate Professor (leave 2004-5-so not reporting)
Chiaki Moriguchi, Economics, Assistant Professor
Victor Shih, Political Science, Assistant Professor
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Asian-American and Asian Diaspora, History Assistant Professor
Brook Ziporyn, East Asian Religion, Associate Professor
Laura Miller, Japanese Anthropology, Loyola-University, Chicago Associate Professor
Mayumi Saegusa, Sociology, University of Illinois Chicago, Lecturer
Yuki Miyamoto, Religious Studies, DePaul University, Visiting Assistant Professor