The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is grieved to inform the Columbia community that Donald Keene, University Professor Emeritus and Shinchō Professor Emeritus, passed away on February 24, 2019 at the age of ninety-six in Tokyo, Japan. Professor Keene was one of the founding figures of the department and the primary catalyst for the development of Japanese studies at Columbia, translating numerous texts that served as the basis for the undergraduate program and teaching courses on Japanese history and literature for over half a century. His scholarship and service has proved invaluable to the university, and his legacy is commemorated by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, an institute dedicated to advancing the understanding of Japan and its culture in the United States through university instruction, research, and public education. The department and the Keene Center will host a memorial service in remembrance of the life and work of Donald Keene in the fall of 2019.
For the full obituary, please see the Keene Center’s website:
Please join us in congratulating Paul Kreitman, Assistant Professor of Japanese History, on receiving the 2018 Leopold-Hidy Award for the best article published in Environmental History, an interdisciplinary journal that addresses issues relating to human interactions with the natural world over time. The article, “Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo,” was recognized for its superb writing style, quality of argument and research, and contribution to the fields of environmental history and forest history. Professor Kreitman will be honored for his work at the awards ceremony of this year’s American Society for Environmental History conference in Columbus, Ohio. The department echoes the sentiments of Environmental History and has no doubt that Professor Kreitman will continue to produce great scholarship as his career progresses.
The department is pleased to announce that Madeleine Zelin, Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies, has been elected a trustee of the Business History Conference, a scholarly organization devoted to encouraging all aspects of research, writing, and teaching about business history and the environment in which businesses operate. Professor Zelin has been a leader in the field of Chinese economic and business history and in bringing work on Chinese business history to the wider audience of business historians as a teacher and mentor. She is also a longstanding member of the editorial board of the Business History Conference’s journal, Enterprise and Society. Please join us in congratulating Professor Zelin on this well-deserved honor.
