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Eugenia Lean is Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

We are pleased to announce that Eugenia Lean, the Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute (on leave AY 2017-18) and Associate Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University, has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NEH grant, announced in December 2017, will support the next six months of Professor Lean’s work on the book project “A Chinese Man-of-Letters in an Age of Industrial Capitalism: Chen Diexian (1879-1940),” which examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of industrialization by focusing on the practices and writings of polymath Chen Diexian, a professional writer/editor, science enthusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist. Professor Lean is currently developing the project as a 2017-18 member of the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies.

 by Ross Yelsey

C.V. Starr Library New Acquisition: Documents of the Proletarian Cultural Movement in Prewar Japan

C.V. Starr Library New Acquisition: Documents of the Proletarian Cultural Movement in Prewar Japan

A new DVD on Documents of the proletarian cultural movement of the prewar Shōwa era (昭和戦前期プロレタリア文化運動資料集) has been acquired and is now accessible through the dedicated Japanese language CD/DVD-ROM workstation in the Starr Reading Room (300 Kent Hall).

This DVD, newly compiled by Shōwa Senzenki Puroretaria Bunka Undō Shiryōshū Kenkyūkai, contains various important resources from various sources.

More details, please refer to the CLIO record: https://clio.columbia.edu/catalog/12807594

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Two Thought Provoking Talks by Alisa Freedman

Alisa Freedman (Associate Professor, Japanese Literature & Film, University of Oregon) visited Columbia on the 16th and 17th of November for two talks organized by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture. She was voted by the graduate students of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures for her exciting and diverse areas of research. The first talk dealt with the topic of Japanese women who studied in the United States between 1949 and 1966, which was an enlightening account of U.S.-Japan interaction that brought to attention an overlooked postwar history of Japanese female intellectuals, some of whom pursued graduate studies at Columbia University. The personal life stories of these women enable a reading of U.S.-Japan relations during the postwar/Cold War period as well as the role that female intellectuals played within the interplay of foreign policy, all the while living out their individual goals and aspirations. The second talk was a fascinating insight into fights (literary rather than physical) among prominent figures in the Japanese literary circles that caused a promising young writer to leave the literary field. The textual interactions which she calls “snarks” provide new ways of narrating the history of modern Japanese literature and arriving at a new understanding of that history through a study of affective relationships among writers. Over dinner and lunch following the talks, faculty members and graduate students got a chance to discuss the details of Professor Freedman’s research and enjoy her delightful company.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Written by Stephen Choi

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