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Faculty Profiles
 
     
 

Robert AshmmoreROBERT ASHMORE (Chinese Program; Head Graduate Advisor)
Robert Ashmore, Associate Professor, received his M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Beijing University in 1992, and continued his graduate studies in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he received his Ph. D. in November, 1997. His research focus is on Chinese literature of the third through eleventh centuries, with special interests in lyric poetry and poetic theory, song and musical performance, and traditional concepts of identity and personality. He is currently completing work on a book manuscript on the literary culture of the early ninth century.

 
     
 

MARK CSIKSZENTMIHALYI (Chinese Program)
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Professor, has an AB in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Harvard) and a Ph.D in Asian Languages (Stanford). He uses both excavated and transmitted texts to reconstruct the religions, philosophies, and cultures of early China. Recent books include Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China (2004) and Readings in Han Chinese Thought (2006). He is currently translating a set of Song dynasty essays on the Zhuangzi by Li Yuanzhuo . He is also currently Editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

 
     
 
JACOB DALTON (Buddhist Studies)
Assistant Professor Jacob Dalton received his B.A. (Religious Studies) from Marlboro College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan. After working for three years (2002-05) as a researcher with the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, he taught at Yale University (2005-2008) before moving to Berkeley. He works on Nyingma religious history, tantric ritual, paleography, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is the author of a forthcoming study on violence and the formation of Tibetan Buddhism, and co-author of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (Brill, 2006). He is currently working on a history of Tibetan Buddhism, as seen through the eyes of the "Sutra Empowerment" (Mdo dbang) tradition of the Nyingma school. Future plans include a study of tantric ritual in the Dunhuang manuscripts.
 
     
 

Yoko HasegawaYOKO HASEGAWA (Japanese Program)
Yoko Hasegawa, Associate Professor, received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley. She teaches Japanese Linguistics and serves as Coordinator of the Japanese Language Program. Her publications include: "Fundamental frequency as an acoustic cue to accent perception" in Language and Speech; "Prototype semantics: A case study of TE K-/IK- constructions in Japanese" in Language and Communication; "The (nonvacuous) semantics of TE-linkage in Japanese" in Journal of Pragmatics; A Study of Clause Linkage: The Connective -TE in Japanese, CSLI, Stanford University and Kurosio, Tokyo; "What the Japanese language tells us about the alleged Japanese relational self" in Australian Journal of Linguistics; and "Embedded soliloquy and affective st ances in Japanese" in Emotive Communication in Japanese, John Benjamins.

 
     
 

H. Mack HortonH. MACK HORTON (Japanese Program)
H. Mack Horton, Professor, teaches premodern Japanese language and literature. He received his M.A. in 1981 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in 1989 from University of California, Berkeley. Professor Horton specializes in classical poetry and diary literature, focusing on issues of performativity, cultural context, and poetics. He is the author of Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Sôchô and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan (Stanford University Press, 2001), its companion volume The Journal of Sôchô (Stanford University Press, 2001), and the forthcoming Traversing the Frontier: The Man'yôshû Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla (Harvard University Asia Center).  He is also the translator of ten books on Japanese literature, history, and architecture.  Chair of the department from 2003-06, Professor Horton received Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004.

 
     
 

Andrew F. JonesANDREW F. JONES (Chinese Program)
Andrew F. Jones, Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997. Professor Jones teaches modern and vernacular Chinese literature and popular culture. His research interests include music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children's literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s. He is the author of Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001), co-editor of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled The Afro-Asian Century, and translator of literary fiction by Yu Hua as well as Eileen Chang's Written on Water  (Columbia University Press, 2005).  He is currently at work on a study of evolutionary thinking and developmentalist narrative in modern Chinese literature.

 
     
 

D. Cuong O'NeillD. CUONG O'NEILL (Japanese Program)
Associate Professor D. Cuong O'Neill completed his Ph. D. from Yale University in Japanese Literature in 2002. He teaches courses in Meiji print culture and literature, Taishô aesthetics, and postwar intellectual history and popular culture. His research interests include the novel in comparative perspective, global modernisms, and critical theory (particularly in relation to affect and aesthetics). Recent and forthcoming publications include a study of Mori Ôgai and the bildungsroman (Japan Forum, 2006), an analysis of Natsume Sôseki’s theory of tragic pleasure (Discourse, 2008), and a book chapter on the memories of moving bodies in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (I. B. Tauris, 2009).  He is currently completing a book titled Ghostly Remains: Affect and the Afterlife of Reading in Modern Japan.

 
     
 

William SchaeferWILLIAM SCHAEFER (Chinese Program)
William Schaefer, Assistant Professor, received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 2000. His research and teaching interests include modern Chinese literature and culture; histories and theories of photography in China; relations between verbal and visual representations; Chinese and global modernisms; landscape representation and geographies of literature; race, primitivism, and anthropological discourse; and comparative studies of literary, ethnographic, and historical narrative. His most recent publications are "Shanghai Savage" (positions: east asia cultures critique 11:1); and “Shadow Photographs, Ruins, and Shanghai’s Projected Past” (PMLA 122:1 [2007]. He is completing a manuscript on photography and modernist literature and art in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. His new research concerns the engagement of contemporary Chinese documentary photographers with rural-urban migration and historical traces; and Chinese photography and image theories during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

 
     
 

Robert SharfROBERT SHARF (Buddhist Studies)
Professor Robert Sharf received his B.A. (Religious Studies) and M.A. (Chinese Studies) from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) from the University of Michigan. He taught at McMaster University (1989-95) and the University of Michigan (1995-2003) before joining the Berkeley faculty. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002), co-editor of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (2001), and is currently working on a book tentatively titled How to Read a Zen Koan. In addition to his appointment in EALC he serves as Director of the Group in Buddhist Studies, Director of Religious Studies, and Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies.

 
     
 

Jiwon ShinJIWON SHIN (Korean Program)
Jiwon Shin, Assistant Professor, received her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2003. She specializes in Korean literature and culture from the late Chosôn period through the modern era, focusing on issues of space and identity. Her research interests include: intersection of literature and cartographic imagination; conceptions of urban culture and literary coteries; early modern print culture; nationalist aesthetics. She is working on a book manuscript on late 18th and 19th century literary culture in Seoul. She also translates cultural theories and feminist criticisms as well as literary works from contemporary South Korea.

 
     
 

Alan TansmanALAN TANSMAN (Department Chair)
Professor Alan Tansman earned his A.B. from Columbia University in East Asian Studies, his M.S.J. from the School of Journalism at Columbia,and the M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale University in Japanese literature. His specialization is modern Japanese literature and culture. He is the author of The Writings of Kôda Aya (Yale) and the forthcoming The Culture of of Japanese Fascism (Duke), and The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (California). He is now writing a book comparing Japanese and Jewish responses to atrocity, is co-editor of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature and the forthcoming Tokyo as an Idea: Isoda Kôichi's Essays on Literature and Space (California). In addition to literature, Professor Tansman has published on topics including Japanese cultural criticism, popular culture, film, Area Studies, Japanese and Jewish responses to atrocity, and the sublime in Japanese literature. He has also translated Japanese fiction and criticism.

 
     
 
Paula VarsanoPAULA VARSANO (Chinese Program)
Paula Varsano, Associate Professor, received her B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature in 1980 from Yale College and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988. Professor Varsano specializes in classical poetry and poetics from the third through the eleventh centuries, with particular interest in literature and subjectivity, the evolution of spatial representation in poetry, the history and poetics of traditional literary criticism, and the theory and practice of translation. She is the author of Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and its Critical Reception (Hawaii, 2003), and is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Coming to Our Senses: Locating the Subject in Traditional Chinese Literary Writing.
 
     
 

Sophie VolppSOPHIE VOLPP (Chinese Program and Comparative Literature)
Sophie Volpp, Associate Professor, received her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard in 1995. She specializes in Chinese literature of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Research interests include the history of performance, gender theory, the history of sexuality, and the representation of material culture. Her forthcoming book Worldly Stage (Harvard) concerns the ideological niche occupied by the theater in seventeenth-century China. Her current research examines the depiction of material objects in late-imperial literature, focusing on the relation between the representation of objects and the representation of the self.

 
     
 

Duncan Ryuken WilliamsDUNCAN RYUKEN WILLIAMS (Buddhist Studies)
Duncan Ryuken Williams, Associate Professor of Japanese Buddhism, received his B.A. in Religious Studies at Reed College (1991), his M.T.S. at Harvard Divinity School (1993), and Ph.D. in Religion at Harvard University (2000). He works primarily on Japanese Buddhist history, Buddhism and environmentalism, and American Buddhism. He is the author of The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, 2005), translator of four Japanese books, and editor of three volumes including American Buddhism (Curzon, 1999) and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhism and the World War Two Incarceration Experience (forthcoming, UC Press) and an edited volume, Issei Buddhism in the Americas: The Pioneers of the Japanese-American Buddhist Diaspora. His next project focuses on Buddhism and bathing practices in Japan through the themes of healing and purification.

 
     

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