Chun-Fang Yu

SHENG YEN PROFESSOR EMERITA

Office: 304 80 Claremont
Phone: (212) 854-4147
Email: cy2126@columbia.edu
Educational Background

BA: Tunghai University (’59)
MA: Smith College (’61)
PhD: Columbia University (’73)

Research Interests

Chinese Buddhism, East Asian Religions, Buddhism and Gender, Buddhism and Modernization

Chun-fang Yu was born in China and educated in Taiwan, coming to the States for graduate study. Before coming to Columbia, she taught at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, from 1972 until 2004, serving as the chair of the Religion Department from 2000. Her primary field of specialization is Chinese Buddhism and Chinese religions. She is interested in the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on Chinese society as well as the impact of Chinese religious traditions on the domestication of Buddhism in China. She is the author of The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis, Kuan-yin, the Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara, and the co-editor of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Univ of California Press, 1992). In 2013, she completed a study of Buddhist nuns in contemporary Taiwan, focusing on the roles they have played in the revival of Buddhism in Taiwan during the last three decades.

Her current research interests reflect her continuing fascination with the transformation of Buddhism in China. She has begun a new project which is tentatively entitled “The Creation of a Buddhist Pantheon”; it studies the pairing of two bodhisattvas: Guanyin and Dizang, in iconography and temple architecture from the tenth century to the present.

Selected Publications

Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii, 2013)

Encountering the Dharma: Studies in Chinese Buddhism (Global Scholarly Publications, 2005)

Kuan Yin, the Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara (Columbia University, 2001)

In Search of the Dharma: Memoirs of A Modern Chinese Buddhist Pilgrim (editor, State University of New York, 1992)

The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (Columbia University, 1981)

Henry Smith

PROFESSOR EMERITUS

Email: hds2@columbia.edu

Educational History

AB: Yale University (’62)
AM: Harvard University (’64)
PhD: Harvard University (’70)

Research Interests

History of Early Modern Japan, Japanese Woodblock Prints, Urban History of Edo/Tokyo, Chūshingura

Professor Smith wrote his dissertation on the prewar Japanese student movement, published as Japan’s First Student Radicals (Harvard, 1972) and Shinjinkai no kenkyû: Nihon gakusei undô no genryû (Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1972). His recent work deals with aspects of the history of Chūshingura, in an effort to integrate the historical Akô Incident with its many later stage and literary versions as a unified history of storytelling in Japan.

Professor Smith continues his research on various dimensions of the “Chūshingura” story, looking at the various ways in which the Ako Incident of the “47 Ronin” of 1701–1703 has become Japan’s “national legend” through retelling, embellishment, and reenactment in multiple media over three centuries. More recently, he has turned to research on the modern history of the city of Kyoto and the ways in which Kyoto has become the focus of a continuing reinterpretation of the meaning of “tradition” in modern Japan.

He has written extensively on woodblock prints, including Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, and Kiyochika: Artist of Meiji Japan (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988). For his recent writings and translations, see his webpage.

Selected Publications

“The Trouble with Terasaka: The Forty-Seventh Rōnin and the Chūshingura Imagination,” Nichibunken Japan Review (2004)

Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji (George Braziller Inc., 1988)

Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (George Braziller, Inc., 1986)

Learning from SHŌGUN: Japanese History and Western Fantasy (editor and co-author, Santa Barbara, 1980)

Japan’s First Student Radicals (Harvard, 1972)

Barbara Ruch

PROFESSOR EMERITA

School: School of the Arts
Office: 407 Kent Hall
Email: bruch@columbia.edu
Phone: 212-854-7403

Educational Background

MA: University of Pennsylvania (’60)
PhD: Columbia University (’65)

Research Interests

Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Japanese Literary and Cultural History, Illuminated Literary Texts, Japanese Heritage Musical Instruments and Vocal Literature

Professor Emerita, Barbara Ruch, is full-time Director of the IMJS: Institute for Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives and was the Founder and first Director of EALAC’s Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and the Shincho Professorship of Japanese Literature for Donald Keene and successors which she conceptualized and for which she raised the endowment during 1984-1986 with support in Japan of eminent writers and cultural leaders, Shiba Ryōtarō, Abe Kōbō, Nagai Michio, Takemitsu Tōru and the then president Satō Ryōichi and general manager Nitta Hiroshi of Shinchosha Publishing Co.

Professor Ruch received her M.A. in classical Chinese and Japanese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania under Derk Bodde and Dale Saunders and her Ph.D. at Columbia in Medieval Japanese Literature and Cultural History under Tsunoda Ryūsaku, Donald Keene and Ivan Morris. Her training at Kyoto University had been with the linguist Sakakura Atsuyoshi, the historian Hayashiya Tatsusaburō, and the medieval fiction specialist Okami Masao. She then taught Classical and Modern Japanese language and Japanese literature at Harvard, then at Penn, and also, commuting to New York, she shared the teaching of Pre-Modern and Modern Japanese Literature with Professor Keene as Visiting Professor at Columbia for several years. She moved permanently to Columbia as Professor in 1984, at which time she brought to Columbia under the EALAC umbrella the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies (IMJS) which she had founded at Penn in 1968, and which had a name change in 2013 to IMJS: Institute for Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives. At Columbia, in addition to her seminar on medieval vocal narratives, she instituted EALAC’s first courses specializing in Major Women Writers in Pre-Modern and Modern Japan as well as the History of Female Clerics in Japanese Buddhism. Professor Ruch retired from teaching and became Emerita in 1999, but has remained full-time director of the Institute to the present day.

The mission of the Institute has been, and remains, the identification, resurrection and research of sorely neglected constituents, often unrecognized as academic fields, that are fundamental to the understanding of Japanese culture. The first decades of its research were devoted to the first full-scale collaborative study of the huge body of neglected medieval Japanese illuminated fictional texts (Nara ehon, otogizōshi) and to opening the field of the performing art based on calligraphed paintings known as etoki. In 1978-79 Professor Ruch directed the first international and interdisciplinary research team of scholars of literature, art, and religion in on-site collections of such texts discovered in London, Dublin, New York, Tokyo and Kyoto, that had till then been unknown to scholars in Japan. The works were published in full in the 1980s. She was awarded the newly established Minakata Kumagusu Prize in 1991. During the decade of the 1990s she then led research projects that resulted in the resurrection of the history of eminent Japanese women clerics and publications on the thirteen extant Imperial Buddhist Convents in Nara and Kyoto which culminated in permanent on-going projects of research and restoration (architecture; textiles; hand-calligraphed records, etc.), and the establishment of a sister collaborating office in Kyoto. Following exhibitions and symposia at Columbia and in Tokyo she edited the first English-language book on the subject (Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan). In 1992 she was the first non-Japanese to receive the Aoyama Nao Prize for Women’s History. In 1999 she received the Order of the Precious Crown, with Butterfly crest, an imperial decoration for eminent royal and other women founded by the Meiji Empress. In 2000 she was awarded the Yamagata Bantō Prize, given yearly to one Japan specialist worldwide for leadership and creativity in the study of Japan. In 2008 she was the first foreign woman to receive the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (BDK) Cultural Award in furthering the history of Buddhism, and in 2009 the previous decades of research and collaboration with the Imperial Convents culminated in the Tokyo exhibition focused on all thirteen convents and with the appearance of the bilingual Amamonzeki: Hidden Heritage – Treasures of Imperial Buddhist Convents. In 2011 she received the Kyoto Cultural Award from the Governor of Kyoto. Prof. Ruch signed an agreement with Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) and the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (Nabunken), with IMJS as liaison in 2011 for a five-year multi-dimensional project focused on East-West issues of conservation and historic preservation and an exchange of related faculty lecturers to Columbia and Columbia student interns to Japan.

Columbia celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2004, Juilliard School of Music marked its 100th anniversary in 2005 and Columbia’s eminent Department of Music was about to celebrate its 110th anniversary in 2006 – a time of re-evaluation of direction in Japanese Studies. An Institute survey of American academia revealed that the only discipline of Japanese Studies that has no degree program or center in the U.S. was the huge and culturally influential field of Japanese heritage music. Concerned with the neglect of Japanese instrumental heritage music in both academia as well as in music training programs in and outside Japan, Professor Ruch turned to the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs and in collaboration with the Columbia Department of Music launched a program in 2006-2007 to teach Japanese Classical Gagaku Court Music and form a Gagaku Instrumental Ensemble within the Music Performance Program and the Columbia and Juilliard joint program. In 2007 the Mentor/Protégé Program was created for intensive training in Tokyo for the most talented musicians emerging from the Gagaku training program, and in 2011 Edo-period shakuhachi and koto ensembles were added to the performance program. March 2020 marks the 15th anniversary of this Japanese ensemble initiative, which includes course credit, instrumental training, workshops for composers, the summer six-week Mentor/Protégé Program, annual NY master classes, and Miller Theatre concerts. Expanded collaboration with Columbia’s Computer Music Center (CMC) and the School of the Arts Sound Arts Program (SAP) has opened new doors for young Japanese and American musicians and composers to explore the sonics of Japanese heritage instruments, the first project of which was a computer analysis of various types of koto instruments in a collaboration between the Columbia CMC and the Tokyo University of the Arts, published in the August 2015 issue of the Hōgaku Journal.

In 2013 Prof. Ruch organized the first New York Summit on preserving the past, enriching the present, and engaging the future of Japanese Heritage Music. It was at this time the Institute – no longer and not for a long time focused exclusively on the medieval age of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu – changed its working name (by request of collaborating scholars) to the IMJS: Institute for Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives. The subsequent Tokyo Summit of Japanese Heritage Music in June 2014, enlarged by four strategy teams during 2014, continues work today in broadening music teacher training beyond Western instruments to include Japanese instrumental training as well.

During the academic year 2018-2019 the Institute marked the 50th anniversary of its founding with concerts in New York and at Yomiuri Ōtemachi Hall, Tokyo, featuring advanced Gagaku musicians from Columbia; commissioned stage interpretations of the medieval picture scroll Kiku no sei monogatari (Chrysanthemum Heart) by  Japanese musicians; and, with newly composed music, and vocalizations of the 12th-century lyrics of imayō songs by the celebrity singer Otomae that miraculously had been transcribed live by Retired Emperor GoShirakawa who had been her student.