A Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges to Promote Asian Studies
ASIANetwork - Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows for 2011-12
With the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, ASIANetwork, a consortium of over 150 North American colleges, is supporting 4 teaching fellow positions each year for 3 years beginning in 2010-11.
Teaching Fellows should have earned a doctorate or terminal degree from a North American university within the prior 3 years. Applicants who are ABD may be considered, provided that they have a scheduled completion date prior to the beginning of the fellowship year verified by their graduate advisor.
For 2011-12, ASIANetwork selected 4 colleges. The names of their teaching fellow with a link to each of their biographies are below.
- Davidson College: Anthropology and Asian Studies
- Laura Kaehler Elder (Ph.D., University Center of the City University of New York, 2009)
- Gettysburg College: Chinese Language and Culture
- Susan Chen (Ph.D., Emory University, 2009)
- University of Wisconsin – Whitewater: Asian Religion
- Mary Alyson Prude (Ph.D., University of California Santa Barbara, expected 2011)
- Washington and Jefferson College: Chinese Studies
- Dewen Zhang (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, expected 2011)
Biographies of Teaching Fellows
Laura Kaehler Elder received her PhD from the Anthropology Department at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in 2009. Her specialties, developed through fieldwork in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, are global political economy and cosmopolitanism. She is currently at work on a book entitled The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Malaysia, Inc. versus the Markets. This book, based on dissertation research funded by Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright IIE and Wenner-Gren Foundation grants, is an ethnographic investigation of the restructuring of the Malaysian capital market in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, showing how the calculative practices of financial experts intersect with the global financial regime, reformatting relations between subjects so as to create a forceful, indeed compelling scale of value.
Dr. Susan Chen is a cultural anthropologist whose subfields of study encompass Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, and Film and Visual Studies. While holding one M.A. degree in Chinese History and another in South Asian Studies, Dr. Chen earned her interdisciplinary doctoral degree from Emory University in 2009. Entitled Living with “Tibet”: The Local, the Translocal, and the Cultural Geography of Dharamsala, her dissertation examines the life worlds and social networks of Tibetans that contemporarily stretch between India, China and beyond. As a native of Taiwan, Dr. Chen is also a trained and experienced instructor in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and she has studied Hindi and modern oral Tibetan for her research purposes.
Following her doctoral studies, Dr. Chen worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for the Diaspora Studies project sponsored by the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. At Gettysburg, she will teach one language course on business Chinese, an introductory course on contemporary Chinese popular culture and society, and a seminar on the anthropology and history of Tibet.
University of Wisconsin – Whitewater
Mary Alyson Prude, PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara with a dual emphasis in South Asian Religions and Buddhist Studies, will be the 2011-12 Luce Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. Her dissertation is titled, “Difference, Gender, and Extraordinary Knowing: A study of Himalayan revenants.” The dissertation is a study of lay Buddhist women in Nepal who have undergone near-death experiences, and who later assumed important positions in their local communities. Her master’s degree from UC Santa Barbara was a study on celibate women and Buddhist nunneries in Nepal. She is fluent in Nepali, Chinese and Tibetan. Ms. Prude received numerous awards including Fulbright-Hay dissertation fellowship to support nine-months of field research in Nepal and Tibet, the Comstock Award and the Rowny Fellowship for her research in religious studies, and a Jacob Javits Fellowship.
She will be co-teaching Introduction to Eastern Religions, a sophomore-level course, in fall 2011. She will also be expanding on-line materials and develop an on-line version of the popular course. In spring semester, she will be teaching a junior-senior level course, The East Asian Tradition, and a special studies seminar on a topic coming from her dissertation research.
Washington and Jefferson College
Dewen Zhang studied history at State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her dissertation explores the precarious relationship between Chinese women and World War II, 1937-45 (known in China as the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance). Her work focuses on the history of military nursing, war and gender relations, and women’s movements of twentieth century China. Her research has been funded by aids from the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Department of History at Stony Brook University. She holds a M.A. in history from University of Maryland at Baltimore County and a B.A. in history from Fudan University.
Before coming to Washington and Jefferson College, Dewen Zhang has been teaching at department of history and gender and women studies program at SUNY Stony Brook University and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania. She has also worked for the United Nations in New York City. During her stay at Washington & Jefferson College, Dewen Zhang will teach courses on women in East Asia, war and East Asian society, and general themes on gender and women’s studies; and co-teach a course “Asian Heritage”.