University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in East Asia

Faculty
Students:
     Preparing for the field
     In the field
     Writing up
     Recent PhDs

Faculty:

Julie Chu - Fuzhou, China (Globalization and transnational processes, gender and kinship, the body and ritual, economics and exchange in contemporary China)
Judith Farquhar - China (medical anthropology, anthropology of everyday life, popular culture studies, post-structural and critical theory).

Students working on East Asia also regularly work with faculty in History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations:

Susan Burns
Jacob Eyferth
Norma Field
James Ketelaar
Wu Hung
Anthony Yu

to top

Students:

Preparing for the Field

Chen Chen - China (Anthropology of the body, visual anthropology, historical anthropology, postcolonialism)
William Feeney - Japan (Linguistic anthropology; language ideology, genre and intertextuality, popular representations of violence, institutionality, language education and standardization, religion in Japan; "Intertextualities and Institutionalizations of Violence in the Production of Japanese Comedy and Comedians")
Danielle Flam - China (Place, home, community, memory, views on death and dying; the state, political authority; "Relocation and (Re)burials around the Three Gorges Dam: The Politics of Dislocation and the Rebuilding of Community")
Kathryn Goldfarb - Japan (Gender relations, nationalist discourses; medical anthropology: reproductive technology, science studies, kinship; gender and discourse; "Preserving the Body Politic: Nationhood, Citizenship and Advanced Reproductive Technologies in Japan")
Emma Hite (A) - Mongolia, Eurasian Steppe (Bronze and Iron Age; ritual and symbolic behaviors in nomadic mortuary contexts; human and faunal remains)
Britta Ingebretson - China (Linguistic anthropology, language and ideology, critical language study, class, the modernizing process and postsocialism, transforamtion of urban spaces)
Sarah Kautz (A) - Japan (Material aspects of Western interaction with early modern Japan [Dutch at Dejima]; Commodities and materiality, value and commensuration, early modern globalization and commerce, sociality of economic transactions, alterity)
Kiho KIM - Harbin, Heilungjiang, N. China (Transformation of local governance in China, urban-place making in rural districts, the political language of environmentalism and sustainable development; government promotion of organic farming/farmers' response to top-down environmental engineering)
Xiao-bo Yuan - China (Christian conversion, religious discourse, narrative analysis, study of public/private space)
Cheng-Guang ZHAO - Tianjin & Beijing, China (Theory of social action, anthropology of architecture, social production of the built environment, politics of urban everyday life, community-making at different scales of society; "Social Imaginations in Some Chinese Spatial-Architectural Phenomena")

to top

In the Field

Lily Chumley - Beijing, China; "Creativity and Capitalism in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing" [art education, ideologies of creativity]
Nicholas Harkness - Seoul, Korea; "The Voices of Seoul: A Study of Chronotopic Shift at the Phonic-Sonic Nexus" [semiotics of culture, theoretical perspectives on the voice]
Charles Hartley (A) - Luoyang, China; "Community, Pottery, and Public Culture: Crafting the State in the Luoyang Basin, North China, 3000-1500 BCE"
Tal Liron - Northeast Asia: Mongolia; Anthropology of affect, value and circulation, modernities; "Intimacy as Imagined Community in Post-Revolutionary Mongolia"

to top

Writing Up

Joseph Hankins - Tokyo, Japan; Tanneries in Japan; semiotics of space, human rights, minority issues; "Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan"
Hu LIN (A) - Inner Mongolia; "Nomadism, Urbanization, and Social Order: An Archaeological and Historical Study of a Steppe Town in Northeast China (10th-12th Centuries AD [Liao]"
Urmila Nair - Dharmasala, India (Tibet in Exile); "When the Sun's Rays are as Shadows: The Rituals of the Nechun Deity in Tibetan Exile"
Shunsuke Nozawa - Tokyo & Hokkaido, Japan; "The Advent of Readers: The Project(ion) of Remembering and the Semiotics of Inscription in Japanese Personal Historiography"
Chris Oliver - Tokyo, Japan; "Occidentalist Imaginings and the Question of Encounter: The Intercultural Communication in Contemporary Japan"
Saul Thomas (Jt.Hist) - Nanjing and Beijing, China; Capitalism, liberalism & the culture concept; Orientalism; intellectuals, 'modernity' and 'culture' in Post-Mao China; "Culture and Nation in the Post-Mao Historical Imagination"
Christopher Walker - Lhasa, Tibet; "The Social Life of Open-Source Software in Tibet"

to top

Recent PhDs

Anya Bernstein - Taipei, Taiwan; "Why ‘Taiwan is too democratic': Legitimation, Administration, and Political Belonging in Taipei"
Kevin Caffrey - Southwest China (Yunnan); "China's Muslim Frontier: Empire, Nation, and Transformation in Yunnan"
Joanne Cullinane -Yokohama, Japan "Domesticating AIDS: Illness, Stigma, and Identity in Contemporary Japan"
Janet Fair - Sacred Heart Girls' Schools, Tokyo, Japan; "Japanese Women's Language and the Ideology of Japanese Uniqueness"
Magnus Fiskesjo - Kunming, Yunnan, China; "Farmer Fortresses in the Land of the Bottle Gourd: An ethnoarchaeological study of the Wa social landscape, Ximeng, Yunnan Province, China"
D.J. Hatfield - China: Fujian Province (Meizhou, Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangshou) and Taiwan Province (Lugang, Beigang, Dajia, Taichung); "Disappearing in the Crowd: How Taiwanese Pilgrimages became Culture"
Sheila Jager - Seoul, Korea [Seoul National, Yonsei, & Korea Universities]; "Narrating the Nation: Students, Romance & the Politics of Resistance in South Korea"
Kai-Shyh Lin - I-lan & Taipei, Taiwan; "The Frontier Expansion of the Qing Empire: The Case of Kavalan (modern I-lan) Subprefecture in 19th Century Taiwan"
Siân Victoria Liu - Beijing, China; "In the Wake of Workers: Civil Society and the Moral Economy of Marketization in a Beijing Neighborhood"
Thomas Looser - Tokyo and Kyoto/Osaka, Japan; "The Celebration of Eternity: Space-Times of the State and Gestures of History in the Nô Theater of Early Modern Japan"
Jeffrey Martin - Taiwan; "Keeping the Peace in Regime Change: Police Work in Taiwan"
Hajime Nakatani (Jt w/Art History) - Palace Museum & Academic Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; "Bodies and Signs in Medieval China"
Christopher Nelson - Okinawa; "Fanning the Spark of Hope: Political Opposition in Postwar Okinawa"
Robert Oppenheim - Kyongju, Korea; "The Place of Projects: Remaking Locality in Kyongju, South Korea"
John Osburg - Chengdu, China; "Engendering Wealth: China's New Rich and the Rise of an Elite Masculinity"
Katherine Rupp - Warabi-shi, Saitama, Japan; "Gifts in Japan: Ritual Constitution of Personal Identities, Social Relationships, and Cosmic Values through the Presentation of Objects"
Ellen Schattschneider - Hirosake, Aomori Prefecture, Northern Japan; "Circuits of Discipline: Production, Reproduction and the Work of the Gods in Tsugaru, Northern Japan"
Mary Scoggin - Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China; "Ethnography of a Chinese Essay: Zawen in Shaoxing, China"
SHAO Jing - Shashi Hospital of Chinese Medicine, Hubei Prov., China; " 'Hospitalizing' Traditional Chinese Medicine: Identity, Knowledge and Reification"
Teri Silvio - Taipei, Taiwan; "Drag Melodrama/Feminine Public Sphere/Folk Television: 'Local Opera' and Identity in Taiwan"
David Slater - Tokyo, Japan; "The Cultural Construction of Democracy and the formation of Class Culture: A Study of a Vocational High School in Japan"
Terry Woronov - Beijing, China; "Children, the Nation and the Future of China"
YiChing Wu - Shanghai, China; "The Other Cultural Revolution: Politics and Practice of Class in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969"

to top