Photo: Andrew L. Markus (left)
This lectureship was established in memory of Andrew L. Markus, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Washington from 1986-1995. Established through the generosity of family and friends, this annual lecture honors Professor Markus's contribution to the study of Asian languages and literatures.
The lecture series brings to the University of Washington distinguished scholars in the field of Asian Languages and Literature. The annual lecture is considered the premier public event sponsored by the department and is the highest honor that the department can bestow on a scholar in the field.
Upcoming Lecture
2025 | "Recipes for the Life Politics of Domesticity in Global Korea"
Hyaeweol Choi, University of Iowa
May 19, 2025 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
Food serves as a junction for a vast array of entities, structures and practices, spanning from microorganisms to national politics, the global economy, and the environment. Food also helps us understand the mobility of people, ideas, and materials across time and space. Food cultures have been shaped and transformed by this mobility and the particular historical contexts in which they evolve. In this presentation, I take food as an entry for understanding gender history and culture in general, and the politics of domesticity in particular. As an illustration, I specifically focus on the gendered history of street food in South Korea, exploring its evolution through the forces of war, poverty, industrialization, and nation-branding in the age of globalization. Using ethnographic fieldwork, life history, and media analysis, I present food-centered vignettes, as experienced and narrated by ordinary women, which offer new insights into existing and emerging gender dynamics in the context of geopolitical, economic, and cultural changes. In doing so, I aim to illustrate how the most intimate and mundane practices of cooking and eating provide a useful vantage point from which one can examine the confluence of the private, the public, and the global.
Professor Hyaeweol Choi is the Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. She was also President of the Association for Asian Studies (2024-25). Her research interests are in the areas of gender, empire, modernity, religion, food and body, and transnational history. She is the author of Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (2020), New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (2013), and Gender and Mission Encounters: New Women, Old Ways (2009). She is also a co-author of Gender in Modern East Asia: An Integrated History (2016), and a co-editor of Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Modern East Asian Gender History (forthcoming). Her current research project, entitled “Food and the Life Politics of Domesticity in Transpacific Korea,” examines the domestic as the confluence of the local, public, global and environmental structures, aiming to shed new light on everyday gender politics and performances through food ethics and practices in the current era of excess, inequality, and ecological crisis.
Registration link to come.
Past Lectures
2024 | "Melayu Malay — Mystery Miracle"
Hendrik Maier, University of California at Riverside
May 6, 2024 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
View the recording of this event on our department YouTube Channel:
2023 | "Inevitable Impositions: Censorship and Modern Chinese Literature"
Michel Hockx, University of Notre Dame
May 8, 2023 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
View the recording of this event on our department YouTube Channel:
2022 | "Japanese Propaganda and the Power of Love: Mobilizing the Wartime Empire"
Sharalyn Orbaugh, The University of British Columbia
May 9, 2022 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
View the recording of this event on our department YouTube Channel:
2021 | "Half-Bird, Half-Fish: The New Grammar of Time Past in Seventeenth-century Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit"
David Shulman, Professor Emeritus of The Hebrew University
May 4, 2021 - Zoom webinar
View the recording of this event on our department YouTube Channel:
2020 | (Postponed due to pandemic.)
2019 | “Yi In-jik’s ‘The Widow’s Dream’ and the Origin of Modern Korean Literature in Japan"
John Treat, Professor Emeritus of Yale University
May 21, 2019 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2018 | "The Appropriation of Tang Poetry in Later Chinese Painting"
Ronald Egan, Confucius Institute Professor of Sinology from Stanford University
May 8, 2018 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2017 | "On Native-Speaker-Hood, Translingual Competence, and Asian Language Education"
Junko Mori, Professor of Japanese language and linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
May 9, 2017 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2016 | "Clouded Mirror: The Uttarakāṇḍa of the Vālmīkirāmāyaṇa as an Occluded Guide to Statecraft"
Robert P. Goldman, William and Catherine Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit, UC Berkeley
May 10, 2016 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2015 | "Manuscript Cultures of Asia"
Michael Friedrich, Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
May 12, 2015 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2014 | "Transplanting Buddhism on the Korean Peninsula"
Robert E. Buswell, University of California, Los Angeles
May 13, 2014 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2013 | "Family Memorials, Waka, and Material Culture"
Edward Kamens, Yale University
May 7, 2013 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2012 | " Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown: Some Buddhist approaches to kings and their problems"
Paul Harrison, Stanford University
May 8, 2012 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2011 | "Literary Languages, Koines, and the Emergence of Modern Standard Chinese"
South Coblin, University of Iowa
May 11, 2011 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2010 | "For the Gods Love the Obscure: On Translating the Rig Veda"
Stephanie Jamison, University of California in Los Angeles; Head, Program in Indo-European Studies
May 12, 2010 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2009 | "What Counts as Literature? The Astonishing Revival of The Cannery Ship (1929) in Recession-era Japan"
Norma Field, University of Chicago
May 7, 2009 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2008 | "Figures for Memory: Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry"
Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado at Boulder
May 14, 2008 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2007 | "Heterodox Reasoning in Early Modern North India: To What Consequence?"
Monika Boehm-Tettelbach, University of Heidelberg
May 16, 2007 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2006 | "The Pleasures of Japanese Poetry"
Edwin Cranston, Harvard University
May 15, 2006 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2005 | "Travels of a Culture: Chinese Poetry and the European Imagination"
Pauline Yu, American Council of Learned Societies
May 11, 2005 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2004 | "What's 'Lovely' About It? (Korean) Poetry's Appeal and Survival (even in English)"
David McCann, Harvard University
May 12, 2004 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2003 | "With Kindness at Heart, a Song on the Tongue, and Gold and Steel in Hand: Religion, Power, and Ideology in the Mahabharata, the Great Epic of India"
James L. Fitzgerald, University of Tennessee
May 15, 2003 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2002 | "Reading (or Not) the Tale of Genji"
Royall Tyler, Harvard University
May 16, 2002 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2001 | "Cognitive Approaches to Chinese Historical Linguistics"
Christoph Harbsmeier, University of Oslo
May 22, 2001 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
2000 | "On the Evolution of Hindi as a Language of Literature"
Ronald Stuart McGregor, University of Cambridge
May 23, 2000 - Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room (Kane Hall 225)
1999 | "Hong Taeyong and the Korean Rediscovery of China in the Eighteenth Century"
Gari Ledyard, Columbia University
May 3, 1999 - Seafirst Executive Education Building, Boeing Auditorium
1998 | "A Scene in Natsume Soseki's Last and Uncompleted Novel, Meian"
Edwin McClellan, Yale University
May 15, 1998
1996 | The Andrew L. Markus Memorial Symposium on Tokugawa Japan
May 10, 1996