The Center for Southeast Asian Studies invites you to a Friday-at-Noon lecture:
Peranakan Musical Cultures in Singapore
Lee Tong Soon, Department of Music, Emory University

12:00pm – 1:30pm
Friday, November 6, 2009
1636 SSWB/International Institute

The Peranakan community in Singapore has made much concerted efforts in enhancing public understanding of their culture. With a mix of Chinese and Malay heritage, the roots of the Peranakan communities can be traced back to 17th century Malacca. Since the 1980s, Peranakan culture has been represented in the form of restaurants specializing in their cuisine, revival of Peranakan plays, and permanent exhibits of their architecture, dress, household paraphernalia, and crafts in museums. Such efforts complement, and indeed constitute the broader State's effort to create interests and concern on local heritage, thereby affirming the community as an integral part of the State's conception of a national culture. Peranakan musical practices in Singapore include the performance of music and songs in Peranakan plays, singing of Peranakan hymns and translations of English hymns in the Peranakan patois for Catholic masses, and dondang sayang singing sessions.

Much of the State's representation of Peranakan culture is inclined towards nostalgic and reified perspectives of Peranakan identities and belies the current state of anxiety the community faces in affirming who they are. In this presentation, I would like to explore the ways in which Peranakan music underscores the changing dynamics of Peranakan identities in Singapore. By focusing on musical activities of pre-WW2 amateur Peranakan music groups, I want to show how different musical practices of the community in early 20th century Singapore reveal shifting moments in the meanings, values, and functions of being Peranakan.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies.

"Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture" will feature work by Bright Sheng, Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition and CCS faculty associate.

Bright Sheng's personal and professional experiences are in the spotlight as part of the Carnegie Hall festival's focus on modern Chinese composers and in a recent Wall Street Journal article on the first group of Chinese composers to emerge from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution.

Prominent Chinese-American community activist and friend of CCS Frances Wang discusses upcoming Chinese music concert and art talks on annarbor.com.

Please click on poster for additional information.

National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students

Full Proposal Deadline Date: December 8, 2009

Support of international activities is an integral part of the NSF's mission to sustain and strengthen the nation's science, mathematics, and engineering capabilities, and to promote the use of those capabilities in service to society. In particular, NSF recognizes the importance of enabling U.S. researchers and educators to advance their work through international collaborations, and of helping ensure that future generations of U.S. scientists and engineers gain professional experience beyond this nation's borders early in their careers.

What the Program Offers
The East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes provide U.S. graduate students in science and engineering:
1) first-hand research experience in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore or Taiwan;
2) an introduction to the science and science policy infrastructure of the respective location; and
3) orientation to the society, culture and language.

The primary goals of EAPSI are to introduce students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering in the context of a research setting, and to help students initiate scientific relationships that will better enable future collaboration with foreign counterparts. All institutes, except Japan, last approximately 8 weeks from June to August. Japan lasts approximately 10 weeks.

Award Benefits
EAPSI awardees receive a $5,000 stipend, international round-trip air fare to the host location, and are supported to attend a pre-departure orientation in the Washington, D.C. area.

Foreign co-sponsoring organizations provide additional support to cover EAPSI students' living expenses abroad during the period of the summer institutes, and provide an orientation to the science environment and culture(s) of each location.

Fields of Study
• Biological Sciences
• Computer and Information Science & Engineering
• Education (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics)
• Engineering
• Geosciences
• Mathematical & Physical Sciences
• Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences
• Multidisciplinary Research

Eligibility
As of the deadline date of the application year, applicants must meet all of the following criteria:
• U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
• Enrolled in a research-oriented master's or Ph.D. degree program (including joint degree programs);
• Students enrolled in joint Bachelor/Master's programs must have graduated from the undergraduate degree.
• Enrolled at a U.S. institution in the United States; and
• Pursuing studies in fields of science and engineering research and education supported by the National Science Foundation.

Previous EAPSI awardees may apply, but only to a new host location (Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, or Taiwan).

Administered by the American Society for Engineering Education
(www.asee.org/fellowships)

DEADLINE: DECEMBER 11, 2009.

The Association for Asian Studies is pleased to announce plans for a ninth consecutive AAS Dissertation Workshop, which will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting in Philadelphia next spring. The workshop will again be organized and led by David Szanton, and follow the model used in previous workshops.

No longer are Asian studies largely focused on courts and peasants, ancient cultures, classical texts, and traditional forms. Today all across the humanities and social sciences scholars are approaching and re-interpreting a rapidly changing Asia through various forms of popular culture (film, sports, TV, music, dance, radio, online networks, fiction, fashion, cuisine, fan clubs, martial arts, bars, drugs. etc.), concerned with how it is both producing and marking social, and cultural change all across the region. Intergenerational differences and tensions are growing all across the region, often with serious political consequences. Popular culture, as an alternative “unofficial view of the world,” as a form of subtle or overt resistance to the hegemonic, has become an important lens for approaching and analyzing Asia’s rapidly expanding middle classes, urbanization, consumerism, differentiation and stratification, political mobilization, geographical mobility, diasporic influences, and both transnational and globalizing sensibilities.

This workshop is intended to bring together doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences who are (1) developing dissertation proposals or are in early phases of research or dissertation writing; and who are (2) also dealing with the kinds of issues mentioned above in the context of contemporary or historic Asian states and societies.

The workshop will be limited to 12 students, ideally from a broad array of disciplines and working on a wide variety of materials in a variety of time periods, and in various regions of Asia. It also will include a small multidisciplinary and multi-area faculty with similar concerns.

The workshop will be scheduled for the days immediately following the 2010 AAS annual meeting in Philadelphia. It will cover two and one-half days of intense discussion beginning the evening of Sunday, March 28, and running through the afternoon of Wed. March 31.

The AAS will be able to provide limited financial support for participants including three night’s accommodations, meals and “need-based” travel funds up to a maximum of $300. Students needing additional funds to attend the workshop are encouraged to approach their home institutions for support. It is hoped that participants also will attend the AAS annual meeting immediately prior to the workshop.

(1) Two copies of a current Curriculum Vitae, and

(2) Two copies of the dissertation proposal, or if the research and writing is well under way, a statement of the specific issues being addressed, the intellectual approach, and the materials being studied. Neither the proposal nor statement should exceed 10 double-spaced pages in length. Application materials (hard copy only, no email) must reach the Dissertation Workshop Program, AAS, 1021 East Huron St, Ann Arbor MI, 48104, no later than December 11, 2009.

Workshop participants will be selected on the basis of the submitted projects, the potential for useful exchanges among them, and a concern to include a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, intellectual traditions, and regions of Asia. Applicants will be informed whether or not they have been selected for the workshop by early January.

For further information about the workshop, or eligibility, please contact Michael Paschal (mpaschal@asian-studies.org) or David Szanton (Szanton@berkeley.edu)

CALL FOR PAPERS
How might the understanding of “East Asia” – be it in terms of a geographical, historical, and cultural locus or as a space of fantasy and the imaginary – be illuminated by accounting for the ways in which desires are produced, structured, regulated, and mobilized through various institutions and discursive formations? Whether understood as lack or a productive force or a form of affective labor, desire is a concept that intersects with and imbricates a range of complex issues operating on the level of the libidinal as well as the material economy. Nationalism and imperialism, genders and sexualities, aesthetics and consumer culture, and the politics of alterity are but a few, yet are all
significant to the study of East Asia.

The East Asian Studies Graduate Student Conference at the University of Toronto invites paper submissions for its 10th annual conference titled DESIRE, to be held on March 13, 2010. We seek papers that can critically interrogate the operations of desire, articulating how they are embedded in different modes of social organization at historically specific moments and bringing them into relation with larger issues of how East Asia is situated in the world. Submissions from graduate students around the world in all disciplines within and beyond the field of East Asian Studies, including history, sociology, anthropology, economy, art, literature, cultural studies, philosophy, and others are welcome.

Possible topics for papers include (but are not limited to):
– theories of desire and their complications in the East Asian context;
– literary and cultural representations and mediations of desire;
– the mobilization of desires and affects through cinema and other visual spectacles;
– intersections of nationalism and the construction of national identities with the constitution, regulation,
and circumscription of desire;
– the interplay of capitalism, commodity culture, and desiring production in East Asia;
– gender, sexuality, and the regimes through which desire is disciplined;
– the construction of East Asia as a space of fantasy, and its consequent structuring as object of desire.

Selected participants will be asked to submit completed papers by February 15, 2010. Those who wish their papers to be considered for publication should submit a publication-ready copy (about 4000 words). During the conference, participants will be given 20 minutes to present their work; actual presentation papers should be about 1500-2500 words long.

Please e-mail submissions and queries to easgsc2010@gmail.com. Further information as it becomes available will be posted on the conference website at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/easgsc/.

Linda Lim, Strategy Professor, U-M Ross School of Business and CCS faculty associate, sits down for an interview on implications of the new tariff imposed on Chinese tires.

Date: Friday October 23, 2009
Time: 4-6pm

Location: Rm 2022, Thayer Building

Papers to be given:

1) "The yoga in China: narratives of identity, syncretism, and hybridity and the study of East Asian Buddhism."

Professor Charles D. Orzech
University of North Carolina

2) "South Asian refractions in the prism of Diaspora: from ritual clowns and Sufi processions to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bollywood movies."

Professor Pnina Werbner
Keele University
Staffordshire, UK

Papers will be available to distribution, please email harjeets@umich.edu for more information.

The HEAS Graduate Student Conference is an annual conference which aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students to exchange ideas and discuss current research on East Asia. The conference is an opportunity for young scholars to present their research to both their peers and eminent scholars in East Asian Studies. All panels will be moderated by Harvard University faculty. The conference will also enable participants to meet others in their field conducting similar research and forge new friendships.

We welcome submissions from graduate students in all disciplines. Papers should be related to East Asia, Inner Asia, Singapore, or Vietnam. We will consider submissions of individual papers and panel proposals.

1. The yearbook database has been updated with about 300 additional statistical yearbooks, including China 2009 Statistical Yearbook and some other national, provincial and city statistical yearbooks
2. There is a new dynamic map service (Statistics on Map II) for statistical data, which offers dynamic maps, report, charts and living animation.
3. The China Spatial Data Reports and Maps (DemographicsNowChina), which offer spatial intelligence for demographic and business Census data retrieval and analysis. Your users should be able to get full access to all the data of Jiangxi province if your library has not subscribed to it yet.

Please visit http://chinadataonline.org for these updates. And feel free to e-mail chinadata@umich.edu if there is any question.

The workshop will focus on the themes of democracy and identity in any part of Asia. Applicants should be researching some aspect of the politics of identity recognition in Asia in recent decades, and the challenges it has posed to practices and understandings of democracy.

Questions to be considered include: How do emerging democracies accommodate group demands? How do historically defined notions of state and nation clash with emerging claims for ethnic, gender, and sexual identity recognition? How is the very meaning of democracy in Asia being reformulated to account for these claims? What kinds of political spaces have allowed the mobilization of identity-based movements to develop in Asia?

The workshop will take place over two or three days on the campus of the University of Toronto. It will include a small group of students and a few faculty members representing different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. The costs of the workshop, meals, and accommodations will be covered by the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto.

Travel will be subsidized up to a maximum of CDN$500 per participant. Applicants should seek additional travel grants from their home institutions, and consult with the Asian Institute if travel costs prove problematic.

APPLICATION DEADLINE is JANUARY 15, 2010:
Applications consist of two items:
1) A current curriculum vitae.
2) An 8 to 10 page double spaced dissertation proposal. Alternatively, if the work is well underway, an 8 to 10 page double spaced description of the specific issues being addressed, the
intellectual approach, and the materials being studied. Workshop participants will be selected on the content of the submitted projects, the potential for useful exchanges among them, and the
benefits of including a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches and intellectual traditions. Applications should be sent by email attachment to asian.institute@utoronto.ca. Applicants will be informed whether or not they have been selected for the workshop by January 31st. For further information about the workshop or eligibility, please contact asian.institute@utoronto.ca.