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 are thoughtfully selected.

Presenting Faculty for the Institute: Shana Brown, Cathy H. Clayton, Xu Di, Stanley Murashige, Yun Peng, Franklin Perkins, Michele Yeh, Ka Zeng. 

Goqing, 19th Century, Amoy Province, China.                             Institute Presenters:

Photo Credit: www.metmuseum.org

                                                                                                   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).

Cathy H. CLAYTON is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She has lived and worked in China for nearly ten years since 1986. Her teaching and research explore questions of Chineseness – how and why it becomes a compelling form of collective subjectivity at different points in time and space. Her first book, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness, won the 2010 Francis Hsu Award for best new book on East Asia from the Society for East Asian Anthropology. Her forthcoming book examines the Cultural Revolution-style protests in Macau in 1966 that nearly toppled the Portuguese colonial administration. She has studied at Williams College, Stanford University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz; held an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center; and taught at the University of Macau from 2001-2005.

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.

Yun PENG is Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Minnesota, and MA degrees in Philosophy and Women’s Studies, respectively, from Peking University and the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, literary criticism, and film theory. Her current work focuses on contemporary Chinese documentary and independent films. At UHM, her teaching focuses on 20th century Chinese literature and film, including courses on the city in literature and visual culture. At present, she is completing a book on modern Chinese realism.

Franklin PERKINS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. His main teaching and research interests are in early Chinese philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a comparative or intercultural context. He is the author of Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge 2004), Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury 2007), and Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana 2014), and he was co-editor of Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems (Cambridge 2015) (with Chenyang Li). His books have been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese.

Michelle YEH received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. Currently she is Distinguished Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She has published books and articles on modern and classical Chinese poetry, Taiwan literature, comparative literature, and aromatics, as well as literary translations, including three books of poems, respectively by Yang Mu (in English), Huang Xiang (in English), and Derek Walcott (in Chinese).

XU Di is Professor in Education Foundations in the College of Education at the University of Hawaiˋi, Manoa. Dr. Xu Di has more that two decades teaching and administrative experiences in teacher education, education foundations, multicultural and international education. Since earning her doctorate from Harvard University and prior to coming to UHM, she taught at the University of West Florida, Peking University in Beijing, and National Kaohsiung University in Taiwan. She has he has published widely on teacher education, educational foundations, multicultural education, international education, and ESL education. Dr. Xu Di is committed to live the philosophy she is teaching and is actively involved in community service in Hawaii as well as in the U.S. and the world through her non-profit organization, Operating Infinity. Her publications include: Chinese Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Xueji in the 21st Century (edited with H. McEwan, 2016) and A Comparison of the Educational Ideas and Practices of John Dewey and Mao Zedong in China (1992).

Ka ZENG is Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Studies at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on China’s role in the global economy, in particular Chinese trade policy, China’s behavior in the World Trade Organization, and China-related trade dispute dynamics. Dr. Zeng is the author of Trade Threats, Trade Wars (University of Michigan Press, 2004), co-author of Greening China (University of Michigan Press, 2011), editor of China’s Foreign Trade Policy (Routledge, 2007), and co-editor of China and Global Trade Governance (Routledge, 2013). She is a contributor to journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, World Development, Journal of World Trade, International Interactions, China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Social Science Quarterly, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and Journal of Experimental Political Science. Dr. Zeng is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Wong Center for the Study of Multinational Corporations.