News & Events

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 women’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.

The University of Minnesota has been awarded a four-year National Resource Centers (NRC) grant by the Department of Education for the study of Asia. This makes us one of only three universities in the nation with such a Center. Undergraduate programs in Asian Languages & Literatures and in Global Studies along with the graduate program in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media are at the core of Consortium activities.

Join us for our annual ALL Potluck Graduation Recognition Ceremony to honor the graduating ALL majors and minors on May 4 at 4:30 p.m. in Nolte 140. All students taking Asian languages and courses are welcome!

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.

The University of Minnesota has been awarded a four-year National Resource Centers (NRC) grant by the Department of Education for The Consortium for the Study of the Asias (yes, Asias!). This makes us one of only three universities in the nation with Centers that focuses on Asia in general. This grant is accompanied by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships for graduate students studying and researching in Asian languages. The expected four-year funding level for both the NCR and FLAS will be approximately 1.9 million dollars.