EALCTalks! FALL 2020

Friday, October 9th at noon
Allyson Tang, "Teaching Foreign Languages Courses Remotely: Challenges and Best Practices" 

Teaching foreign language courses in a remote context is challenging: how do we design and revise our courses so that students can stay engaged, learn with confidence, and acquire comprehensive language skills? In this talk, Allyson Tang reflects on her experiences participating in the Graduate Division Remote Instruction Innovation Fellowship and discusses the challenges, myths, and best practices in foreign language remote instruction. She will also discuss her experiences fostering inclusion and diversity in foreign language instruction, followed by a Q&A session.  

Friday, October 16th at noon
Daryl Maude, "Intimate Futures in Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue" 

This paper, a portion of my third dissertation chapter, examines futurity in Murakami Ryu's novel, Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū ("Almost Transparent Blue," 1976), a novel of teenage aimlessness in the base town of Fussa. I focus on the ways the Japanese and Okinawan characters interact with American soldiers, and the thematisation of interpenetration and mingling. 

Friday, October 30th at 1pm
Ishani Ghosh, "Foreign K-Pop Artists and the Hallyu Wave" 

K-Pop companies actively try to enter international markets through various localization strategies. The most common strategy is to include foreign members in K-Pop groups because these artists serve as a bridge between Korea and their homeland. My research explores the nature of inclusion, treatment, and motivation for foreign K-Pop artists to debut in Korea. 

Friday, November 6th at noon
Xiaoyu Xia, "Infrastructure of Feeling: Imperial Networks, Typographic Modernity, and Literary Sensibility in China and East Asia (1900-1937)." 

This project investigates a hitherto neglected aspect of modern Chinese literature: the interplay and interdependence between literature and typography.  My dissertation considers how the Chinese printed world was reshaped by the onslaught of Western and Japanese typography, and how these imported formats and technologies played a decisive role in the making of a new literary sensibility.  I explore the physical forms and material conditions of modern literature, ranging from systems of punctuation, strategies of labelling new genres, types of fonts, to techniques of bookbinding and textures of paper.  I also seek to place these aesthetic innovations in the context of Sino-Japanese cultural contact and political conflict, as well as in the global context of print capitalism and typographic modernism.