Imagining Asia

The ASIANetwork Board is very pleased to invite you to attend the 18th Annual ASIANetwork Conference, which will be held at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, from Friday, April 9, 2010 through lunch on Sunday, April 11, 2010. In addition to the full range of panels by ASIANetwork members, the program will feature keynote and plenary session speakers who will take up topics related to several regions of Asia and who will address current issues dealing with the theme: Imagining Asia.

The weekend will feature a pre-Conference day tour on Friday of Atlanta area sites, many of which will be Asia-related. The tour will be led by members of the Agnes Scott College community, our local hosts in this Southern metropolis. Members planning to join the tour will want to arrive early at the Emory Conference Center, in time to leave on the bus that departs at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning. The bus will return to the conference center no later than 5:00 p.m. The cost of the tour that includes lunch is a bargain at $40. Space is limited, so sign up for it early, along with your conference registration.

The conference begins officially with dinner on Friday evening, followed by an address by James L. Watson, who is the Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Professor Watson was the President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2003 and is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Watson is an ethnographer who has spent over 40 years working in south China, primarily in villages. The author of numerous books and articles, his research has focused on Chinese emigrants to London, ancestor worship and popular religion, family life and village organization, food systems, and the emergence of a post-socialist culture in the PRC. In recent years, Professor Watson has investigated the impact of transnational food industries in East Asia, Europe, and Russia and the social consequences of SARS in China.

Laurie Patton of Emory University is our Sunday morning plenary speaker. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Professor of Early Indian Religions. For several years during the last two decades she has made her Indian home in Pune, Maharashtra. Her scholarly interests are in the interpretation of early Indian ritual and narrative, comparative mythology, literary theory in the study of religion, and women and Hinduism in contemporary India. The author of numerous books and articles, Professor Patton latest work is titled Scholar and the Fool: The Secular Scholar of Religion and 21st Century Publics, to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Our “hot topic” speaker on Saturday is a historian who has been featured in the popular media because of his book on Saigo Takamori, the inspiration for the character in the 2003 film The Last Samurai. Mark Ravina is the Director of the East Asian Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at Emory University. With a specialty in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese politics, Professor Ravina has written various articles exploring the transnational dimensions of state-building.

The Program Committee and the Board of ASIANetwork are especially grateful to the membership for their fine response to the call for papers and for the excellent papers and panels they have submitted for our 2010 program. We have an outstanding mix of scholarly panels, roundtables, pedagogical sessions, and poster presentations in addition to the cultural presentation and reception organized and held at Agnes Scott College.

• Conference Program


• Conference Registration