Three Assistant Professors in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature -- Nazry Bahrawi (Southeast Asian Program), Ungsan Kim (Korean Program), and Joe Marino (South Asian Program) -- have been awarded First Book Fellowships by UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities. These fellowships provide funding for assistant professors to devote intensive attention to first book manuscripts that are near completion. Fellows receive a summer salary and a research stipend, and take part in a cohort of scholars that works together over the course of the summer to bring their manuscripts nearer to completion.
Prof.s Bahrawi, Kim, and Marino each have book manuscripts at advanced stages. Nazry's manuscript, titled How to Kin an Animal: Malayophone Folklores and Race in Southeast Asia, is a decolonial project aiming to render visible epistemologies from the Global South. It examines animal lores and tropes in literature and film from the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia to articulate ‘the Malayophone’ as a bioregional imagined community that is interspecies and inter-Asian in nature.
Ungsan's project, Future Imperfect: Crisis, Temporality, and the Intra-Asian Network of Queer Cinema, considers the intra-Asian emergence and proliferation of stylistically innovative and politically progressive queer cinema since the 1990s. Troubling the “haunting” of the national cinema paradigm in Asian cinema studies and simultaneously provincializing the Euro-American centrality in queer cinema studies, it views queer Asian cinema as a regionally constructed and temporally negotiated cultural movement that was formed in times of crisis rather than an ambiguous set of national cinemas.
Joe's manuscript, The Great Conflagration Hell and Other Misfortunes: Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras from the Senior Kharoṣṭhī Fragments, presents a first edition, translation, and comparative study of four Gāndhārī Buddhist sūtras from the second-century CE, while exploring early Buddhist metaphorical language for hell and other unfortunate destinies as described in the texts.
Congratulations, Prof.s Bahrawi, Kim, and Marino!