Early Career Workshop on “Mobilities, Itineraries, Circulations: Rethinking Asian Connections”

Center for Asian Studies 
University of Georgia 

April 26, 2024 

The Center for Asian Studies of the University of Georgia invites early-career scholars (including advanced graduate students) to participate in an in-person one-day interdisciplinary workshop on the theme of “Mobilities, Itineraries, Circulations: Rethinking Asian Connections.” In recent years, there has been a wealth of scholarship from and about Asia on the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and objects through time and space; the politics, technologies, and infrastructures that allow or restrict these movements; and their representation in art, literature and film. This workshop seeks to bring together early-career scholars working on these topics to revisit and engage with the state-of-the-discipline(s), discuss their own contributions, share ideas and references, and receive feedback on works-in-progress in a small-group setting.

Participants will read pre-circulated papers in advance (20-30 pages), and the workshop time will be devoted to providing constructive feedback.  

Location: 

Board Room, Administrative Building, North Campus, UGA

Schedule:

Coffee and Pastries: 8:15-8:45am 

1st Panel: 8:45-10:15am: Performativity, Subjectivity, and Identity

Abinash Dash Choudury (UGA) "Can Poetry be Autobiography? The Problems of Self in Jagannatha Dasa's Oriva Bhagabata"

Hongyi Yu (Columbia), "Performing Propaganda on the Road: Internecine Contention and Itinerant Propagandists During the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1941"

Ali Ahsan (UGA), "From the Pali turn to The Buddha and His Dhamma: Reformulating the “Sacred” in Navayāna Buddhism"

Keung Yoon Bae (Georgia Tech), "The Astrology and MBTI of K-pop"

Moderator: Mi-Ryong Shim (UGA)

Break: 10:15-10:45am

2nd Panel: 10:45-12:15pm: Materiality, Consumption, and Circulation

William Bamber (Toronto), "Visuality, Consumption and early Anti-Imperialist Internationalism in 1870-80s Asia"

Dan Du (UNC-Charlotte), "From Canton to the Coast: The Pivotal U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1842-1865"

Yushu Geng (NYU-Shanghai), "Undesirable Books: Colonial Print Censorship and Chinese Nationalism in British Malaya, c. 1930s"

Dodom Kim (Rice), "Paper Commodity: Political Economy of Legal Papers in Contemporary Urban China" 

Moderator: Ari Levine (UGA)

Lunch: 12:15-1:15pm

3rd Panel: 1:15-2:45pm: Legality, Illegality, and Mobility

Luther Cenci (Stanford), "Family Matters: Marriage, Divorce, and Female Chastity in Diasporic Chinese Legal Culture, 1780-1840"

Victor Fong (Yale), "Rethinking Openness and Globalism in the Medieval World: Travel Ban s in Tang China"

James Gerien-chen (Florida), "Between Empire and Nation: Taiwan Sekimin and Mobility, 1895–1912"

Weiwei Luo (Florida State), "Property and The Polity: State and Resources in the Global Nineteenth Century"

Moderator: Kalyani Ramnath (UGA)

Break: 2:45-3:15pm

4th Panel: 3:15-4:45pm: Diaspora, Networks, and Liminality

Anu Antony (Harvard), "Habits, Airplanes and Anxieties: Understanding the Transnational Migration of Keralan Catholic Nuns"

Victoria Do (UGA), "Before Exodus: Vietnamese Helicopter Pilots and Vietnamization in Savannah Georgia, 1965-1990"

Tadashi Ishikawa (Central Florida), "Bordering Masculinities: Sex Tourism, Gender, and Japan in Asia from the Mid-1960s to the Late 1970s"

Bill Kelson (UGA), "Two Opium Diasporas in China’s Integration into the World Economy, 1866-1883"

Moderator: Timothy Yang (UGA)

Dinner: 6-8pm

Organizers: 

Ari Levine, Horace Montgomery Professor of History
Kalyani Ramnath, Assistant Professor of History
Mi-Ryong Shim, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies
Timothy Yang, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Asian Studies

Sponsors:

The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Department of History, and the Horace Montgomery Chair in History