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Recent News
March 21, 2018
Directing this year's summer study abroad program to Beijing, China is Professor Chan Lu, and co-director, Liping Yu. Twenty UW students will attend this UW faculty-led program for eight weeks from June 28 through August 22, 2018. The program will be housed in the Beijing Language and Culture University, the oldest and most renowned university in China for teaching Chinese as a second language.
Our 15 credit program encompasses morning intensive Chinese language classes, afternoon... Read more
February 28, 2018
The Department of Asian Languages & Literature is proud to announce a new summer study abroad program bringing students to Vietnam. Led by Dr. Bich-Ngoc Turner, the program offers 5 UW credits in Vietnamese language and cultural studies, and counts toward undergraduate I&S or VLPA requirements. Traveling to the likes of Ha Noi, Hai Phong (Seattle's sister city), Cat Ba Island, Yen Tu Mountain, and the Bach Dang River, the program will offer a deep engagement with modern Vietnamese... Read more
January 3, 2018
In October, Professor Zev Handel was invited to Seoul to deliver the 71st Societas Koreana Lecture, titled "The Hidden Influence of Chinese Characters and Words on Korean Vocabulary and Writing". This non-technical talk was presented to an audience of foreign diplomats, educators and business leaders. Four doctoral graduates of our department, Sun-Mi Kim, Jung-Im Chang, Jeongsoo Shin, and Wook-Jin Jeong, were in attendance. Dr. Kim was the moderator who introduced Professor Handel. The hour-... Read more
December 15, 2017
Mobilizing Krishna's World by Heidi R. M. Pauwels, professor of Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington, was published by University of Washington Press. Here are excerpts from the publisher's description:
Savant Singh (1694-1764), the Rajput prince of Kishangarh-Rupnagar, is famous for commissioning beautiful works of miniature painting and composing devotional (bhakti) poetry to Krishna under the nom de plume Nagaridas. After his throne was usurped by his... Read more
November 12, 2017
On September 15-6, Prof. Heidi Pauwels organized an international symposium on “Memory Construction and Emotion in India, Past and Present,” as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary effort to understand how Hindu, Muslim, and Jain cultural self-understandings were shaped in India’s past and how that relates to the present. An international team of scholars presented their work on the processes involved in memory construction and the formation of emotional regimes as expressed in early vernacular... Read more
October 31, 2017
Ms. Kima Hotta performed a dramatic recitation of excerpts from the medieval Japanese martial epic "The Tale of the Heike" before an audience of more than 200 people at the University of Washington, Seattle, on October 25, 2017.
Kima Hotta is an accomplished dramatic reciter of Japanese literary texts and leader of Rodoku Network Japan. Since 2003, Ms. Hotta has devoted her efforts to the preservation of the beauty of the Japanese language through dramatic recitations of classic and... Read more
October 10, 2017
The members of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature regret to announce that we will suspend instruction in Thai.
In order to accommodate students previously enrolled in First-Year Thai, we are offering Second-Year Thai only during AY 2017-18. Further courses in Thai will not be offered after Spring 2018, and we do not anticipate reviving the curriculum in the near future.
This decision was not taken lightly, as we have offered instruction in Thai for the past fifty years. It was... Read more
October 2, 2017
October 10th 2017, Odegaard Library 220, UW Seattle, 10 AM – 3:30 pm
For the second year in a row, the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia in San Francisco has partnered with the Southeast Asia Center’s Language Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, Pauli Sandjaja, to present a one-day symposium on topics that cut across regional boundaries and affect broad communities. This year’s symposium brings together scholars working across many... Read more
September 22, 2017
As an undergraduate, Bang Zheng spent his nights doing what most future medical students do: running through flashcards, memorizing new and unfamiliar terms, learning to diagnose and navigate complex systems one part at a time.
Only Bang wasn’t learning the clinical features of tuberous sclerosis or a slew of anatomical terminology. Bang was studying Japanese Kanji, the logographic characters that form part of the Japanese writing system.
“Every day I would set apart a few hours for science and... Read more
August 18, 2017
At the time of her passing in March 2009, former Asian Languages and Literature faculty member Carol Goldberg Salomon had been working for many years on an annotated translation of the songs of Lālan Sai, the renowned Baul poet who lived in what is now Bangladesh in the late nineteenth century. The Bauls are the modern inheritors of the centuries-old syncretic tradition of Bengali mysticism, incorporating and combining elements of tantric spiritual practice from Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic... Read more