2014-2015 Visiting Faculty & Scholars
Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Anthropology
Susan Brownell received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990, and joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri—St. Louis in the fall of 1994. Dr. Brownell is an internationally recognized expert on Chinese sports and has done fieldwork in China, primarily in Beijing. Her research interests are sports and body culture. In 2007-08 she was a Fulbright Senior Researcher at the Beijing Sport University, doing research on the Beijing Olympic Games. At UMSL, she teaches Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; Ideas and Explanations in Anthropology; Senior Seminar; History, Theory and Practice of Anthropology; The Body in Culture; and Cultures of East Asia. Teaching at Yale as a Visiting Faculty in East Asian Studies and Anthropology in the Fall of 2014, she taught both “Body and Gender in China since the Late 19th Century,” which touched on the effects of social change in China on concepts of health, sports, beauty, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality; and “Cultural Performance in Modern East Asia,” which focused on the history and anthropology of organized cultural events in East Asia from the early twentieth century to the present.
Visiting Fellows in East Asian Studies
Trained as an architect, Congrong He is now an associate professor in the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University, China. Her research covers the history of Chinese architecture from ancient times to the present. She specializes in the history of traditional Chinese architecture and has published four books, five book chapters, and more than thirty articles. So far she has completed several important research projects and gathered a rich body of first-hand materials on ancient Chinese architecture. One of her books, Ten Years of Surveying and Mapping Ancient Chinese Architecture, will be granted the Excellent Academy Prize of the Third Book Awards of Chinese University Press. One of her lectures on ancient Chinese architecture was given on the Mooc (massive open online course, www.edx.org) in the fall of 2014.
Su-san Lee received her PhD in history at Brown University. She studies new Confucianism and teaches intellectual/cultural history of modern China and Taiwan at the University of Taipei. Her recent book Soul in Peace: The Intellectual Re-orientation of Private and Public Spheres in Republic China (in Chinese) deals with Chinese intellectuals’ searching for new orders in the 20th century politically, spiritually, and aesthetically. Her research at Yale, “Being Confucian Literati in Modern China: Ch’ien Mu and Chinese History Education in the 20th Century,” is part of her book project on the tension and dialog between Confucian classics and modern historiography.
Visiting Research Scholars in East Asian Studies
Henri-Paul Francfort is an archaeologist specializing on Central Asia from Proto-history to Antiquity, and is Director of Research Emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. He is currently researching the art and archaeology of the Iron Age steppe nomads of Inner Asia in order to complete a book manuscript and articles related to unpublished artifacts discovered during the excavations of the Berel frozen kurgan Nr 11 in Atlay, Kazakhstan. This research focuses on the reciprocal processes of borrowing, transformation, and transmission of Greek and Achaemenian shapes; along with Graeco-Roman, Graeco-Bactrian, and Gandharan arts.
Timon Screech was born in Birmingham, UK, and received a B.A. (Hons.) in Oriental Studies (Japanese) at Oxford, before completing his Ph.D at Harvard in 1991. He also studied at the universities of Geneva and Gakushuin. He has taught the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, since 1991, and in 2006 became Professor of the History of Art. He is also Head of the Department of the History of Art & Archaeology, and Head of the School of Arts (SOAS-SOA). Screech is the author of some dozen books on the visual culture of the Edo period. His Ph.D was published as The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (CUP 1996) and is still in print in a second edition (Curzon, 2002). Perhaps his best-known work is Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (Reaktion, 1999; second, expanded edition, 2009). More recently, he has introduced and edited the writings of two 18th-century travelers, as, Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775-1796 (Routledge, 2005), and Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779-1822 (Routledge, 2006). His field-defining general study, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan was published in 2012 (Reaktion Books/Hawaii University Press). His numerous writings have been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Romanian. He is currently working on the early history of the East India Company, and its role in cultural exchange.
Waka Hirokawa is an Associate Professor in History at the Tekijuku Commemoration Ceneter, Osaka University. Her work is focused on community responses to state policies targeting Hansen’s Disease in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to several articles, she is the author of Kindai Nihon no Hansen-byō Mondai to Chiiki Shakai (The Problems of Hansen’s Disease and Regional Communities in Modern Japan, 2011), and the co-translator of Ann Janetta’s The Vaccinators (Shutō Denrai, 2013). Among her current projects are studies titled Rethinking the Relationship between Poverty, Social Status and Disease in Modern Japan’s Regional Communities, and Constructing a New Archival Science Theory Based on Medical Materials.
Yale World Fellow
Shu “George” Chen is an award-winning journalist with more than a decade of reporting experience on China’s financial industry and economic reforms. He is currently the Financial Editor and Mr. Shangkong Columnist at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s premier English language newspaper. George joined the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in February 2012. In his current role, he leads a team of specialist reporters and edits the banking page for the SCMP. He also works closely with the Editor-in-Chief on the newspaper’s exclusive content and social media strategy. Based in Hong Kong but born in Shanghai, George’s writing is informed by his experiences in the Greater China region’s two financial capitals. He is the author of “Foreign Banks in China” and is currently preparing a manuscript on the interplay between Shanghai and Hong Kong for publication. George previously worked for Reuters and Dow Jones in Shanghai and Hong Kong, with numerous overseas assignments. He holds a Master’s degree in international relations and a Bachelor’s degree in economics, and is a candidate for the Doctor of Public Administration degree at the University of Hong Kong.