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

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Students:

Preparing for the Field

Chen Chen - China (Capitalism and culture, kinship and local politics, economic anthropology; "State, Market and Family Networks: The Transition form Collectively Owned Village Businesses to Privately Owned Family Firms")
William Feeney - Japan (Linguistic anthropology; intertextuality, institutionality, violence, mass media, comedy, semiotic methods; "Violence in Japnaese Comedy")
Danielle Flam - Sichuan, China ("Translating Trauma: China's Turn to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]" -- new interest in PTSD after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008)
Emma Hite (A) - Mongolia, Eurasian Steppe (Bronze and Iron Age; ritual and symbolic behaviors in nomadic mortuary contexts; human and faunal remains; the relationship between humans and domesticated animals in the mortuary and ritual practices and contexts of the Xiongnu [terminal Iron Age] in Mongolia)
Britta Ingebretson - China (Linguistic anthropology, language and ideology, critical language study, class, the modernizing process and postsocialism, transforamtion of urban spaces)
Sarah Kautz (A) - Dejima/Nagasaki Harbor, 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 [Dutch and Japanese styles of "feasting" at Dejima], 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)
Ender Ricart - Japan (Time reckoning, futurity, science and technology studies; Japanese high-tech institutions that research and develop products for the improved social and physical well being of the elderly in Japan)
Xiao-bo Yuan - China (Religion, Christianity, history of missionary encounters in China, emergent forms of Christianity ["House Churches"] in contemporary China)

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In the Field

Kathryn Goldfarb - Japan; "National-Cultural Ideologies and Medical-Legal Practices: Infertility, Adoption, and Japanese Public Policy"
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; "Through Potters' Hands: Tracing the Development of Solidary and Political Culture 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"
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")

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Writing Up

Lily Chumley - Beijing, China; "Creativity and Capitalism in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing" [art education, ideologies of creativity]
Urmila Nair - Dharmasala, India (Tibet in Exile); " 'When the Sun's Rays are as Shadows. . .': Religious and Other Utopias -- The Nechung Ritual in the Spectacular Politics of Tibetan Exile"
Shunsuke Nozawa - Tokyo & Hokkaido, Japan; "The Advent of Readers: The Project(ion) of Remembering and the Semiotics of Writing in Japanese Personal Historiography"
Chris Oliver - Tokyo, Japan; "Occidentalist Imaginings and the Question of Encounter: The Intercultural Communication in Contemporary Japan"
Tracey Rosen - Chinese immigrant community in Athens, Greece - "How 'Made in China' is Made in Greece: An Ethnography of Chinese Capitalism at the EU's Frontier"
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"

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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"
Joseph Hankins - Tokyo & Osaka, Japan; "Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan"
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"
Hu LIN (A) - Inner Mongolia; "Urban Landscape and Politics: The Making of Liao Cities in Southeast Inner Mongolia [10th-12th Centuries AD]"
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"

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