2016-2017 Visiting Faculty & Scholars
Visiting Professor in East Asian Studies
Kyung-soo Chun, was educated at Seoul National University (obtaining a B.A. in Archeology and Anthropology and an M.A. in Anthropology) and at the University of Minnesota, obtaining his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1982. Professor Chin taught at Seoul National University from 1982 until retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2014. He is currently a Distinguished Professor as the ASEAN Research Institute at Guizhou University, China.
Professor Chun has held Visiting Professor and Scholar positions at various universities in Japan and China, including: National Museum of Ethnology at Osaka (1997-1998), Tokyo University (2004-2005), Kyushu University (summer 2006 and winter 2007), Yunnan University (winter 2008), Yamaguchi University (winter 2010), Kagoshima University (winter 2013), Okinawa International University (summer 2014) and Kanagawa University (summer 2015). He has published articles and books about ‘History of Anthropology’, ‘Korean Culture’, ‘Colonialism and War’, and ‘Ecological Anthropology’, among other topics. At present he is writing papers on John F. Embree and the Nanjing Massacre.
Ralph Thaxton, Professor of Politics, Brandeis University
Visiting Research Scholar in East Asian Studies
Tomoyasu Iiyama is an Adjunct Researcher at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Tokyo, Japan, who has worked on northern Chinese social history during the Jin-Yuan-Ming and published Northern Local Literati: Civil Service Examination and Its Social Influence in North China, 1127-1368 (in Japanese) in 2011.
Japan Foundation CGP Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies
André Asplund specializes in Japanese foreign policy and diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia. He is particularly interested in how Japan’s normative ambitions of spreading human rights and democracy fits within its international relations with non-democratic and strategic partners in ASEAN. He is currently looking at Japanese foreign aid and EU free trade agreements with Vietnam—a nation of growing strategic importance for the two self-proclaimed “civilian powers”, EU and Japan. He has previously written on the process of institutionalizing human rights in Southeast Asia through the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and it’s something that he is still closely observing.
Lecturer in East Asian Langauges & Literatures
Angelika Koch-Low completed her Master in Japanese Studies and her Bachelor in English Literature at the University of Vienna, with periods of study at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice and Meiji University in Tokyo. Her Master’s thesis focused on the depiction of male-male same-sex desire in comic literature of the Edo period. She then studied for a Ph.D. in Japanese at the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. thesis Sexual Healing: Sexuality, Health and the Body in Early Modern Japan (1600-1868), which she is currently preparing for publication with Cambridge University Press, explored medical views of sex as a health and disease concept in the Edo period.
Angelika is also part of the collaborative project Timing Day and Night: ‘Timescapes’ in Pre-modern Japan, which explores time as a set of social practices prior to the introduction of the Western time system. In April 2015, she convened the international conference Timing Day and Night at the University of Cambridge. In September 2016, she was awarded a JSPS Fellowship at Tokyo University to pursue further research for this project in Japan. Beyond this, her academic and teaching interests extend to modern and contemporary Japan, and she co-edited a volume of research on genders and sexualities (Manga Girl Seeks Herbivore Boy: Studying Japanese Gender at Cambridge, LIT 2013).
Yale World Fellow
As co-founder and managing editor of Caixin, China’s leading business and finance media group, Wang Shuo focuses on providing high-quality news reports through leading an independent and professional standard in China. Under his leadership, the Caixin editorial team won the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University. Before Caixin, Shuo served as managing editor of Caijing, a business and finance magazine in China. Shuo is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Peking University, and a master’s degree in international public policy from Johns Hopkins University.