News & Events

Our Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures and Media (ALCM) offers training in Asian texts, film, and critical theory. Our faculty include scholars in various disciplines across the Humanities. In this program, students pursue extensive coursework in a particular Asian literary or cultural tradition (including emergent, non-canonical cultural forms) while addressing political, theoretical, and methodological concerns. We are open to comparative work as well as new questions concerning discursive constructions of Asia. Faculty interests include poetic and theatrical traditions, film studies, feminist thought and postcolonial theory.

Languages of Concentration: Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Japanese, Korean

Over the last few years, the U of M has witnessed a virtual revamping of South Asian studies. New exciting courses, influential faculty members, a very dynamic bi-weekly seminar series, strong graduate students, and critical language offerings have all made the U of M a leading institution in the country for the field of South Asian studies.

Entitled Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, it describes new autonomous forms of culture that have arisen including avant-garde and commercial literature, and independent film as well as a new entertainment cinema. Congratulations Jason!

Christine Marran, associate professor in ALL, has recently published her new book Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture with the University of Minnesota Press. The book investigates the powerful icon of the female criminal deemed "poison woman," its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining womenÂ’s sexuality and place in Japan.

ALL Professor Michael Molasky was awarded the coveted Suntory Prize for Arts and Letters for his book on jazz in postwar Japan, Sengo Nihon no jazu bunka: eiga, bungaku, angura (The Jazz Culture of Postwar Japan: Film, Literature, the Underground) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2005). The award is among the most prestigious for academic and critical studies written in Japanese.

We are very pleased to announce the establishment of a new graduate student fellowship in honor of Richard B. and Virginia Mather. Over the last sixty years, Richard and Ginny have been dear colleagues and good friends through the many manifestations of Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. During that time, Richard emerged as one of the world’s most important scholars of Chinese literature of the early medieval period.

In his research Richard drew broadly on the literatures of Asia, including Japanese and Sanskrit. So it is particularly appropriate that this new fellowship is available to graduate students in our PhD program in Asian Literatures, Cultures and Media, now entering its fourth year.

To contribute to the Mather Fellowship, please visit Asian Languages & Literatures’ Make a Gift or contact Jill Kane at CLA External Relations.

We are very pleased to announce that Jason McGrath, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film, has just had two significant achievements, both related to his study of film.

First, Jason’s new book Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age has been published by Stanford University Press (March 2008). Andrew Jones of the University of California - Berkeley has said "This is the most lucid, engaging, and theoretically acute account of contemporary Chinese cultural production to have emerged in recent years from the Western academy."

Second, Jason has just won a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2008-2010) for his project “Inscribing the Real: Chinese Cinema from the Silent Era to the Twenty-first Century.� This is one of the University of Minnesota’s most prestigious awards. The major purpose of the McKnight Professorship program is to nurture the careers of the University of Minnesota’s most promising junior faculty members in order to strengthen the faculty for the future. Jason is the only scholar in the Humanities to win the award this year (of 13), and one of only two people in the Humanities in the last three years.

Congratulations! Five of our language teachers and program leaders have recently completed their PhDs.

Lead Teachers of Chinese (Ling Wang), Hindi (Ravi Prasad), Japanese (Tomoko Hoogenboom), and Korean (Hangtae Cho), as well as Chinese teacher and liaison with the Language Center (Zhen Zou) are our new Doctors.

On Saturday, March 31, the Third Midwest University Chinese Speech Contest was held at Northwestern University in Chicago. Of the fifteen gold cups awarded, U of M students from ALL won five of them and one took the silver cup. Twenty-one of the best universities from nine Midwestern states, including the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Washington University and others were represented.

Scott Divine, a student in ALL and the Carlson School, won a prestigious "Degree Scholarship" from the Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) to pursue an MBA at National Taiwan University (Taida). He will begin his three year program with a year of intensive language study at International Chinese Language Program (ICLP). In a nation-wide competition, Annalee Hanson and William Hesch both won MOE scholarships for a year of Chinese study, which they will pursue at the Center for Chinese Language and Culture Studies (CCLC) at National Taiwan Normal University. At the same time Anatoly Detwyler and Margot Goodnow were granted similar scholarships through the regional Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago competition. Anatoly will study at ICLP and Margot will study at CCLC.