UCLA Asian Institute

Dear Colleagues and Friends of the UCLA Asia Institute: As 2015 draws to a close, I have the pleasure of using this holiday message to thank all of you, on and off the UCLA campus, for your continuing support of our work. Whether you participated in one of our programs, attended an event, or supported us financially, you've helped us to enrich our efforts to provide innovative research, graduate training, international collaborations, and public programs on Asia that cross conventional geographic and disciplinary boundaries to the campus and the Los Angeles community at large. One of my goals for 2016 is to increase support for faculty and graduate student participation in our initiatives. Please consider making a tax-deductible year-end gift of any size to support our endeavors. Visit the Asia Institute website for more information about our activities and other programs in the coming year at international.ucla.edu/asia. Best wishes for the remaining weeks of 2015 and continued success in 2016! R. Bin Wong Director, UCLA Asia Institute Some highlights of our year: Ø  International Collaboration: The second annual UCLA-Shanghai Jiao Tong Summer Text Workshop on Chinese archival materials from the 1950s was held at SJTU in summer 2016. Fifteen advanced graduate students from the US, Asia, and Europe participated in this intensive program on reading and research methodologies of documents in the SJTU historical archive, led by UCLA and SJTU faculty. Plans for the 2016 workshop are already under way. Ø  Expansion of Asia in the Curriculum: The Asia Institute seeks to incorporate the development and expansion of curriculum about Asia in all we do. Through our programs, three interdisciplinary Asian studies curriculum projects were launched in 2015: In the spring, the Asia Institute offered an interdisciplinary seminar on Water and the City in Asia through the East Asian Studies major and the Urban Humanities program. UCLA faculty from a variety of departments and regional specializations led guest seminars ranging from a documentary of the river music of Bangladesh to municipal management of the Port of Hong Kong. In February, we hosted a panel on Lost Modernities in China, Korea, and Vietnam to launch a curricular initiative that will build ties between students and faculty studying different parts of East Asia. An interdisciplinary graduate seminar on East Asia in Regional & Global Perspectives will be offered this winter, to better train our students to think, research, and teach broadly across the region. Chinese studies faculty initiated development of a new multi-quarter GE freshman cluster course on the Chinese Classics. This will be the only course on East Asia in the College’s GE cluster program, and is supported by the Taiwan Studies Lectureship. Ø  Taiwan Studies Lectureship: With funding from the Taiwan Ministry of Education, the Asia Institute partnered with the Dean of Humanities to launch the Taiwan Studies Lectureship (TSL), which includes scholar exchanges and a series of forums on the Chinese classical tradition in Asian and global contexts. Our inaugural program featured Wang Fan-Sen, Vice President of Academia Sinica, and Benjamin Elman, Professor of East Asian History at Princeton. The program also funded two UCLA graduate students to conduct fieldwork in Taiwan. Ø  Community Partnerships: The Asia Institute partnered with the Asia Society of Southern California to host a book talk by bestselling author James Bradley for his new book, The China Mirage, and we cosponsored the annual Forecast Asia conference. We also partnered with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Organization to co-host a videoconference of a speech on US-Taiwan relations by ROC President Ma Ying-Jeou with a panel discussion featuring our director and USC and UCI faculty at the Taiwan Academy in Westwood. Ø  Program on Central Asia: Our series on Eurasian Empires and Central Asian Peoples: The Backlands in World History concluded in the spring. Podcasts and reports from a dozen lectures in the series are available on our website. The Central Asia Workshop, a self-run graduate student research group, organized a conference with graduate student presentations on “Central Asia Unbound” and a film screening of the documentary Valley of the Heroes with Tibetan director Khashem Gyal about community Tibetan language education programs in Qinghai Province, China. Ø  East Asian National Resource Center: The Asia Institute is designated as a National Resource Center for East Asia by the US Department of Education Title VI program, managing about $300,000 annually to support education about East Asia on campus and in the community. This year, we launched a multi-year project with the UCLA School of Education History-Geography Project to create lesson plans on Medieval East Asia that meet California content standards and Common Core guidelines for 7th grade history. We also collaborated with the East Asian Library in the development and purchase of a collection of Japanese authentic language materials which have been incorporated into an innovative pedagogical approach in UCLA Japanese language courses. The Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program has funded 23 UCLA students to study intensive Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language and area studies during the past two years.
Asia Institute Member Centers For further information and announcements about research on campus, public events, funding, and ongoing programs, please visit the UCLA Asia Institute website, or the centers' individual websites. Center for Buddhist Studies Center for Chinese Studies Center for India and South Asia Center for Korean Studies Center for Southeast Asian Studies Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies UCLA Program on Central Asia	Support the Asia Institute The Asia Institute relies on the financial support of our friends to sustain and grow our programs. To make a contribution or learn more about giving opportunities, please visit our website.
The Asia Institute promotes Asian Studies at UCLA and fosters greater understanding of Asia through a wide variety of research support, public programs, and community outreach on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.