Faculty News 2010

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Nyan-Ping Bi is one of the co-authors of the widely used Integrated Chinese set of textbooks published by Cheng & Tsui. Revised editions of several of the textbooks and workbooks for this series have been published this year.

William G. Boltz, Professor of Classical Chinese, continues to make Fall and Spring visits to Germany to collaborate with scholars at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, pursuing text-based research into the historical epistemology of early Chinese science, in particular the extent of practical and theoretical knowledge of mechanics, optics, and geometry as reflected in the so-called “Later Mohist texts,” viz., the Mozi “jing” and “jing shuo” chapters.

Collett Cox was invited to give a series of four lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris from June 6-June 23, 2010. The lectures addressed the topic, “Early Gāndhārī Manuscripts and the Development of the Buddhist Scholastic Genre.”

Davinder Bhowmik presented a paper titled “Internationalizing Japanese-Language Literature: Shirin Nezammafi's ‘White Paper'” at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, March 26, 2010. She was also invited to participate in the Japanese Arts and Globalizations Theories of Violence conference held at UC Riverside between May 14-16.

A Chinese translation of Chris Hamm's monograph on modern Chinese martial arts fiction, Paper Swordsmen (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), is being prepared for publication by the Baihua Literature & Art Publishing House in Tianjin, China.

Zev Handel has been named Associate Editor for Brill's new Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. His book Old Chinese medials and their Sino-Tibetan origins was published by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in November.

Akiko Iwata is developing a new fourth-year Japanese-language course and, with grant support from the UW Global Business Center, improving online video learning materials for advanced-level Japanese students.

Wiworn Kesavatana-Dohrs received a Freeman Foundation grant to travel to Thailand this summer to compile audio and video clips to be incorporated into the Thai textbook Thai for Beginners she has authored.

David Knechtges was an invited participant at the conference “Cultural Interactions: Chinese Literture in English Translations,” held in memory of David Hawkes, which took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on April 15-16.

Timothy Lenz's book, Gandhāran Avadānas, has been published as Volume VI in the Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, published by the University of Washington Press.

Chi Nguyen completed her Ph.D. in linguistics at the Institute of Linguistics of the Viet Nam Academy of Social Sciences in Hanoi.

Amy Snyder Ohta is one of approximately 190 prominent linguists whose biographies are profiled in the forthcoming Encylopedia of Applied Linguistics, which is being published by Wiley/Blackwell. The inclusion of her biography is in recognition of her research in an area known as interlanguage pragramatics.

Heidi Pauwels was invited to Columbia University in April, where she delivered two talks based upon her recent research and publications. One of the talks was on “Imagining Community and Caste in Medieval India” and the other on “Who is Afraid of Mirabai?”

Richard Salomon presented a keynote lecture entitled “Reading between the lines of Gupta genealogies: A test case in collateral suppression” at the conference on genealogy in South Asia at Cardiff University (Wales, UK) on May 28.

Michael Shapiro presented a paper on April 20 on “Why Meter Matters: Reading 20th Century Hindi Poetry from the Perspective of Metrical Structure.” The presentation was part of special symposium to honor Professor Herman van Olphen on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.

This summer, Liping Yu will be leading a UW undergraduate Exploration Seminar in Beijing. This is the third year in a row that she has conducted such seminars in China, each of which has had waiting lists of students wishing to participate.

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