Presenting Faculty: Infusing Institutes are content-centered programs that combine broad introductions to Asian cultures and societies with more fine-grained investigations, both of which are useful in developing humanities and social science curriculum modules. In keeping with this, the presenting faculty with both scholarly and teaching excellence in mind.

The presenting faculty for the 2015 program are: Shana Brown (University of Hawaii), Cathy Clayton (University of Hawaii), Chris McNally (Chaminade University), Stanley Murashige (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Anna Sun (Kenyon College), Robin Wang (Loyola-Marymount University) and Ming-bao Yue (University of Hawaii).

Institute Presenters:

Shana Brown focuses on 19th- and 20th-century China, in particular intellectual and cultural history. A Fulbright scholar, she has degrees from Amherst College and the University of California, Berkeley, and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Dr. Brown researches Chinese politics and visual culture, collecting practices, and gender. Publications include Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (University of Hawaii, 2011); “Chinese Women as Collectors and Bibliophiles at the Turn-of-the-Century,” in Material Women: Consuming Desires and Collecting Objects, 1770-1950, (Ashgate, 2009); and “Sha Fei, the Jin-Cha-Ji Pictorial, and the Ideology of Chinese Wartime Photojournalism,” in Visual Culture in Wartime China (Institute of East Asian Studies, 2012).

Cathryn Clayton is a cultural anthropologist of China who teaches in the Asian Studies Program at UH-Manoa. Her work explores the question of Chineseness—how and why it becomes a compelling form of collective subjectivity (be it nationalist, diasporic, regional, civilizational) at different points in time and space. Her research and teaching areas thus encompass sovereignty and imperialism, nationalisms and transnationalisms, ethnicity and diaspora, historical amd collective memory, and place-making, especially as they have played out in 20th-century China and Chinese communities abroad. Her first book examines how conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped the categories through which Chineseness was imagined in Macau (a southern Chinese city that had been a Portuguese colony since the mid-sixteenth century), as that city prepared to be transferred from Portuguese to Chinese administration in 1999. She is currently working on two new projects: an oral history of the Cultural Revolution in Macau, and an ethnography of mixed families in China.

Christopher A. McNally is Professor of Political Economy at Chaminade University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, USA. His research focuses on comparative capitalisms, especially the nature and logic of China’s capitalist transition. He is also working on a research project that studies the implications of China’s capitalist reemergence on the global order. He has held fellowships conducting fieldwork and research at the Asia Research Centre in West Australia, the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Washington. He has edited four volumes, including an examination of China’s political economy: China’s Emergent Political Economy – Capitalism in the Dragon’s Lair (Routledge, 2008). He also has authored numerous book chapters, policy analyses, editorials and articles in journals such as Business and Politics, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Comparative Social Research and World Politics.

Stanley Murashige is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught from 1993 until 2014. Though officially retired from SAIC, he help lead an SAIC study trip to Japan this summer. He continues to teach part-time in the History/Art History Dept. at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA. In 2005-2006, he received the SAIC’s Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award for Excellence in Teaching. He holds a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of Chinese Art from the University of Chicago. Professor Murashige’s research and teaching concentrate on philosophical aspects of Chinese and Japanese art, in a quest for resources in the past that offer interesting answers for questions our we have today. His goal is to uncover narratives that challenge patterns and habits of thinking. An important part of this work has been taking students to Asia, which he has been doing annually since 2000. He has contributed an essay, "Philosophy and the Arts in China" to the Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, edited by Antonio S. Cua, and his article, "Rhythm, Order, Change and Nature in Guo Xi's Early Spring," was published in Monumenta Serica.

Anna Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College, holds a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and a BA from UC Berkeley. Trained as a sociologist of religion and sociologist of knowledge, Sun has conducted archival research as well as survey and ethnographic study of religious life in China. Her work focuses on the revival of Confucianism as a religion in contemporary China, and she also works on larger conceptual and methodological issues in the study of Asian religions.The awards Sun has received include a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2010-11). Her book Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton University Press, 2013) received the “Distinguished Book Award” from the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association, and the “Best Frist Book in the History of Religion Award” from the American Academy of Religion, both in 2014.Sun was a Co-Principal Investigator in the research project “The Empirical Study of Religions in China,” 2006-2009. She is currently a Co-Principal Investigator in the Templeton-funded project “The Concept of Fu in Contemporary China: Searching for Well-Being, Purpose, and the Good Life,” 2013-2016.

Robin R. Wang is Professor of Philosophy, and Director of Asian Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. She is the author of Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012); the editor of Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, (SUNY Press, 2004) and Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period to the Song Dynasty (Hackett, 2003). She has taught a wide range of courses related to Chinese philosophy and culture and has published articles in academic journeys. She has also regularly given presentations in North America, Europe, and Asia and has been a consultant for the media, law firms, museums, K-12 educators, and health care professionals. She was a credited Cultural Consultant for the movie Karate Kid, 2010.

Yue Mingbao received her B.A. degree in Modern Chinese Literature (Beijing University) and Chinese Studies (University of Hamburg), and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Chinese and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She teaches 20th century Chinese literary and cultural studies at the department of East Asian Languages & Literatures and has published widely on the topics of May Fourth fiction, 20th century Chinese women writers, the films of Zhang Yimou, Chinese diasporic identity formations, and Cultural Revolution memory and nostalgia. She is completing a bookmanuscript on the representation of the Chinese diaspora in literature and film. From 2010-2014, she served as Chair of the department of East Asian Languages & Literatures, and she was elected to the Honors Faculty Cohort in 2015. She is also the co-founder and a former co-director (1997-2002) of the International Cultural Studies Certificate Program, which is the only interdisciplinary graduate program at UHM also co-sponsored by the EWC.