Nicole Roldan

Joowon Suh awarded the 2019 Language Consortium Workshop Grant

Joowon Suh (Senior Lecturer in Korean), with Angela Lee-Smith (Yale University) and Meejeong Song (Cornell University), has been awarded the Language Consortium Workshop Grant for AY2019-2020 of the amount of $5,000. The workshop, titled “Project-based Language Teaching and Learning,” will be held at Yale University on October 25 – 26, 2019.

To learn more about the upcoming workshop, please visit https://campuspress.yale.edu/consortiumworkshop2019/.

You can also find more information on The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning at http://languageconsortium.org/.

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Laurel Kendall draft

Laurel Kendall

Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History

Email: lk7@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (’79)
MA: Columbia University (’76)
AB: University of California, Berkeley (’69)

Research Interests

Popular Religions in East Asia, Shamans, Sacred Objects, Contemporary Korea

As an anthropologist of Korea, Dr. Kendall has been working with and writing about Korean shamans for nearly thirty years. Having attended their performances in the early 1970s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea, she became interested in the relationship between this largely female tradition and the operation of gender in Korean popular religion. In 1989, Dr. Kendall collaborated with documentary filmmaker Diana Lee in filming the story of a shaman’s initiation, a visual complement to her books.

More recently, Prof Kendall has been examining how changes in the shamans’ world keep pace with the social and economic transformation of South Korean society. This project includes questions of space and landscape, performance, ritual consumption, national identity, and market anxieties. She is also working with colleagues in Hanoi, Vietnam, studyingl “the sacred life of material goods.” Following the work of Alfred Gell, they are exploring the relationship between people and objects, relationships that have rules, obligations, potential benefits, and dangers.

Working between Korea and Vietnam, Dr. Kendall is cautiously interested in regional comparisons. Vietnamese folklorist Dr. Nguyen Thi Hien and her are exploring points of similarity and contrast between Korean shamans and spirit mediums of Vietnam’s Mother Goddess Religion.

Selected Publications

The Museum at the End of the World: Travels in the Post-Soviet Russian Far East (University of Pennsylvania, 2005).

Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (University of California, 1996)

The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (University of Hawaii, 1988)

Crismon Lewis

Field: Chinese History

Advisor: Feng Li

Email: crismon.lewis@columbia.edu

Crismon Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate of pre-modern Chinese history. His dissertation project, entitled “Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE) Bronze Inscriptions and the Beginnings of Early Chinese Literature,” traces the evolutionary development of early bronze inscriptional practice and explores their literary and aesthetic qualities. His research also concerns questions of literacy and its expansion in early first millennium BCE China.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Crismon received an M.A. in Chinese from the University of Colorado Boulder and a B.A. in Chinese from Brigham Young University.