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:

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
Prasenjit Duara
Norma Field
James Ketelaar
Wu Hung
Anthony Yu

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Students:

Preparing for the Field

William Feeney - Japan (Linguistic anthropology; semiotic methods, violence, media, language ideology, nationalism, genre intertextuality, discourse analysis, culture change)
Danielle Flam - China (Citizenship, state, modernity, fear/anxiety, law, marginality, death. Mao-era fears/anxieties playing out in village/countryside, current plight of the peasantry)
Kathryn Goldfarb - Japan (Gender relations, nationalist discourses; medical anthropology: reproductive technology, science studies, kinship; gender and discourse)
Charles Hartley (A) - North China/Henan ("Ceramic Production and Potting Communities in the Luoyang Basin (2500-1500 BCE")
Sarah Kautz (A) - Japan (Material aspects of Western interaction with early modern Japan [Dutch at Dejima]; Trajectories and interpretation of change within archaeological data sets; Archaeology of commodities)
Lauren Keeler (Jt. Hist.) - China - (Translation, intellectuals, philology, historical anthropology; "Chinese Dialectologists and Their Relation to Earlier Chinese Philological Traditions")
Kiho KIM - North China (Concepts of 'science' and 'enterprise' in agricultural development projects of the Chinese government, models of 'nouveau riche farmers', local leadership, organic farming and the Chinese concept of 'nature', commercial farming and emergence of consumer behaviors in China's countryside)
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)

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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"
Hu LIN (A) - China (Empires, political economy & ancient cities; survey & regional analyses; "Cities of Nomads: Urban Landscape, Political Economy, and Ethnic Boundaries in the Heartland of the Liao Empire [907-1125 AD]")
Tal Liron - Northeast Asia: Mongolia; Anthropology of affect, value and circulation, modernities; "Intimacy as Imagined Community in Post-Revolutionary Mongolia"
Urmila Nair - Dharmasala, India (Tibet in Exile); "The Lives and Time of Exile Tibetans: A Dissertation on Temporality, Collective Karma, and the Semiotics of Identity Formulation"

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Writing Up

Joseph Hankins - Japan; Tanneries in Japan; semiotics of space, human rights, minority issues; "Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan"
Shunsuke Nozawa - 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"
John Osburg - Chengdu, China; "Engendering Wealth: China's New Rich and the Rise of Elite Masculinity"
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"
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"
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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