ACAH2018


"Recentering: Asian Spaces, Cultures and Ideas in the 21st Century"

March 30 – April 01, 2018 | Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art & Art Center Kobe, Kobe, Japan

If globalisation is characterised by simultaneous networks of information, has the concept of centres become obsolete? Or do certain recent geopolitical developments – the fading of America’s “global leadership” being counterbalanced by the rise of China’s, the latter’s new Belt and Road Initiative promising to become a new Silk Road, Britain’s exit from the EU, and the newly proposed trade agreements between Japan and Europe – put the world on the verge of a radical recentering? Will the burgeoning mega-cities in Asia displace the traditional nation-state in the competition for capital, status and enhanced technologies?

Scholars and students of the humanities have long questioned the extent to which shifts in formations of power – empires, countries, regions, cities – resonate through cultural practices that centre on literary and aesthetic meaning, expression and representation. This provokes further questions about how such centres can be identified, defined and represented; and about their relations of other types and modes of centering. Is cultural prestige dependent on political centrality? Or can it be achieved through the circulation of forms and aesthetics that operate in their own economy? For that matter, what is central to its meanings and valuations of culture?

What of the humanities themselves? Fears of their marginalisation are based on the assumption that they were once central, and that the only way to restore their former authority is to argue against their subordination to scientific, technological or vocational forms of education. Can the humanities find new life in multi- or cross-disciplinary frameworks? How can they survive the dominant trend towards more marketable or “useful” forms of education? What is central to the humanities? Should older disciplines such as Literature and Aesthetics reinvent themselves as it be Cultural Studies? Or should they now concentrate on comprehending their own historical genealogies in relation to current scholarly practices?

There is also the question of why, in the wake of postcolonial and transnational decenterings, do elite Anglo-American universities retain so much of their cultural capital? How might humanities redefine themselves if recentred in Asian institutions? Is it possible for the prevailing discourses of Western humanism to be combined with Asian values, goals and traditions? Could such a transformation help to rehabilitate the humanities’ current beleaguered status in America and Europe?

Our present historical moment compels us to think through the implications of these and other modes of recentering. The Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities 2018 provides an opportunity for academics, artists, writers and students to explore the challenges of multi-faceted and interdisciplinary rethinkings of the ways we imagine, articulate and work with centres.

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Programme

  • “The Prospect … towards the East”:  Reorienting Eighteenth-Century British Literature
    “The Prospect … towards the East”: Reorienting Eighteenth-Century British Literature
    Keynote Presentation: Eun Kyung Min
  • British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected
    British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected
    Keynote Presentation: Li Ou
  • From DAMIN to the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
    From DAMIN to the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
    Featured Presentation: Georges Depeyrot
  • The Ceramic Road
    The Ceramic Road
    Featured Presentation: Yutaka Mino
  • Ikebana Workshop
    Ikebana Workshop
    Featured Workshop Presentation: Shoso Shimbo
  • Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia
    Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia
    Featured Panel Presentation: Yukari Yoshihara (Panel Chair), Hiromi Ochi, Hajime Saito and Jiyoung Kim
  • Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
    Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
    Featured Panel Presentation: Hiromi Ochi
  • Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s
    Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s
    Featured Panel Presentation: Hajime Saito
  • Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period
    Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period
    Featured Panel Presentation: Jiyoung Kim
  • Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century
    Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century
    Featured Panel Presentation: Steve Clark (Panel Chair), Myles Chilton, L. Ashley Squires, Michael O’Sullivan and John W P Phillips
  • Global English’s Centers of Consecration
    Global English’s Centers of Consecration
    Featured Panel Presentation: Myles Chilton
  • The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature
    The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature
    Featured Panel Presentation: L. Ashley Squires
  • Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities
    Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities
    Featured Panel Presentation: Michael O’Sullivan
  • Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption
    Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption
    Featured Panel Presentation: John W P Phillips
  • IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
    IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
    Information Session
  • IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017
    IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017
    Award Winners Screening

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Speakers

  • Myles Chilton
    Myles Chilton
    Nihon University, Japan
  • Steve Clark
    Steve Clark
    University of Tokyo, Japan
  • Georges Depeyrot
    Georges Depeyrot
    French National Center for Scientific Research, France
  • Jiyoung Kim
    Jiyoung Kim
    Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea
  • Eun Kyung Min
    Eun Kyung Min
    Seoul National University, South Korea
  • Yutaka Mino
    Yutaka Mino
    Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan
  • Hiromi Ochi
    Hiromi Ochi
    Hitotsubashi University, Japan
  • Michael O’Sullivan
    Michael O’Sullivan
    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • Li Ou
    Li Ou
    Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • John W P Phillips
    John W P Phillips
    National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Hajime Saito
    Hajime Saito
    University of Tsukuba, Japan
  • Shoso Shimbo
    Shoso Shimbo
    RMIT University, Australia
  • Ashley Squires
    Ashley Squires
    New Economic School, Russia
  • Yukari Yoshihara
    Yukari Yoshihara
    University of Tsukuba, Japan

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Organising Committee

The Conference Programme Committee is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Conference Programme Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including special workshops, panels, targeted sessions, and so forth; event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Conference Programme Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and overseeing the reviewing of abstracts submitted to the conference.

  • Myles Chilton
    Myles Chilton
    Nihon University, Japan
  • Steve Clark
    Steve Clark
    University of Tokyo, Japan
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Yukari Yoshihara
    Yukari Yoshihara
    University of Tsukuba, Japan

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Review Committee

  • Dr Anne-Kathrin Wielgosz, Walsh University, United States
  • Dr Divine Ngwa Fuhnwi, Protestant University of Central Africa (PUCA), Cameroon
  • Dr Firas Al-Jubouri, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
  • Professor Jie/Selina Gao, Murray State University, United States
  • Professor Joseph Sorensen, University of California at Davis, United States
  • Professor Kong Ho, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
  • Professor Loren Goodman, Yonsei University, Republic of Korea
  • Dr Reena Mittal, Dak Degree College, India
  • Dr Rosalina Rara Sarabosing, Holy Name University, The Philippines
  • Professor Steve Clark, University of Tokyo, Japan
  • Dr Suranti Trisnawati, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia
  • Dr Yi-Chin Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan
  • Dr Yukari Yoshihara, University of Tsukuba, Japan

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ACAH2018 Grant & Scholarship Recipients

Our warmest congratulations go to Pin-Pin Debbie Chan and Mahbubeh Moqadam, who have been selected by the conference Organising Committee to receive grants and scholarships to present their research at The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities 2018.

IAFOR’s grants and scholarships programme provides financial support to PhD students and early career academics, with the aim of helping them pursue research excellence and achieve their academic goals through interdisciplinary study and interaction. Awards are based on the appropriateness of the educational opportunity in relation to the applicant’s field of study, financial need, and contributions to their community and to IAFOR’s mission of interdisciplinarity. Scholarships are awarded based on availability of funds from IAFOR and vary with each conference.

The Organising Committee of the relevant IAFOR conference awards scholarships to eligible applicants who have submitted exceptional abstracts that have passed the blind peer review process and have been accepted for presentation at the conference.

Pin-Pin Debbie ChanMahbubeh Moqadam

Stuart D. B. Picken Grant & Scholarship Recipient

Debbie Chan is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her thesis explores a new discourse of masculinity in the visual and literary culture of Japan during the 1920s and 1930s – the Modern Boy (modan bōi), commonly shortened as the mobo. By interrogating the ideological tensions and socio-historical forces underpinning the mobo discourse, she looks at the way gender construction was linked in complex ways to Japan’s project of nation-building and international positioning in the early twentieth century.

The Modern Boy As a "Zero" Construct: Ambivalent Representations of Modern Masculinity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Pin-Pin Debbie Chan, University of Western Australia, Australia

This paper interrogates the Modern Boy (mobo) in the 1920s and 1930s Japan as a discourse of modern masculinity underpinned by transnational flows between differing cultures of reference. As a result of these transnational encounters, the mobo was often ambivalently constructed in visual and literary discourses of the time. On the one hand, the visibility of the “body” of the mobo in terms of his fashionable Western attire and engagement in new Western social practices made him a powerful sign of a desirable modern masculinity according to a Western culture of reference. The circulation of the mobo’s image as a beautiful commodified male in popular mass culture also points to a renegotiation of masculinity according to a new gender-blurring beauty aesthetic in early twentieth-century Japan. On the other hand, the mobo was often constructed as an undesirable form of masculinity – a “zero” type masculinity, as he was described by critics of the time. The parodic and emasculated “zero” mobo therefore functioned as a masculine “Other” to establish hegemonic masculine ideals. In the context of Japanese nation-building during the early twentieth century, such representations need to be interrogated as ideological strategies that constructed normative gender identity in Japanese society but also consolidated gendered national identity amidst great transnational cultural flows. As an ambivalent discourse of modern masculinity inflected by transnational flows, the mobo discourse contributes to an understanding of how gender construction was linked in complex ways to Japan’s project of nation-building and international positioning in the early twentieth-century.

IAFOR Scholarship Recipient

Mahbubeh Moqadam is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Turkey and is a PhD candidate in Gender studies at Ankara University, Turkey. She was previously an assistant of Prof. Afsaneh Najmabadi at Harvard University, the US in a historical project about Iranian women. Born in Tehran, Iran, Mahbubeh Moqadam was educated at Tehran University, Iran and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Sociology. Mahbubeh Moqadam attended Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran gaining her Master degree in Women Studies and Family before embarking on various research studies related to gender issues both in Iran and Turkey. She is currently working on her PhD thesis which is about women's rights movements in Iran and Turkey.

The Possibility of Solidarity Listening to Young Women in Iran and Turkey
Mahbubeh Moqadam, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

It is a long time that women in the Middle East are struggling to create their own space in the “modern society”; however, up until now, the picture of them, almost always, has been reproducing the same portrait displaying their independent identity neither in an evolutionary style nor a revolutionary way. Especially during last decades, although feminist-activists’ efforts have changed a variety of situations for women, the mentioned stereotypical picture has been repeating in a large-scale by Media; an image showing the women usually under the veil in different shapes but all are the same in one characteristic: being passive. Studying sociology in Turkey as an international student from Iran, I have recognised that “we” as young female scholars do not know almost anything about each other. Coming across this reality beside my theoretical background, which is based on Postcolonial theories, motivated me to do this research. For doing this research, I have met young female scholars in two capitals: Ankara and Tehran and I have had deep conversations with them. Benefiting from discourse analysis and theories of Postcolonial Studies, I have tried to answer this question: why do we know each other?

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“The Prospect … towards the East”: Reorienting Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Keynote Presentation: Eun Kyung Min

The title of this talk is taken from Jonathan Swift’s 1704 A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought last Friday, Between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library. According to Swift’s boisterous account, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns begins as a dispute over real estate on the hills of Parnassus and ends as a bookish but bloody skirmish between the two camps in St. James’s Library. In the Battle, the ancients, who occupy the highest summit, manage successfully to defend their property from the encroachments of the moderns who are jealous of the ancients’ better “Prospect ... towards the East.” In this talk, I will draw out the larger implications of this phrase by examining how eighteenth-century British writers looked at and toward East Asia in an effort to conceptualise modern British literature in comparative and global perspective. I will also offer a brief overview of significant critical studies that have recently emerged to retell the story of the cross-cultural encounter between East Asia and eighteenth-century British literature. Works to be discussed include William Temple’s Miscellanea essays (1690), Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers (1711-12), Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (serialised in The Public Ledger, 1760-61), and Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761). I will also discuss the critical work of Robert Markley, David Porter, Chi-ming Yang, and Eugenia Zuroski.

Image | Woodcut from the Battle (cropped)

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British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected
Keynote Presentation: Li Ou

The reception history of British Romanticism in twentieth-century China unfolds a drama of vicissitude, corresponding to the tumultuous course of the Chinese national history and violently shifting literary politics. While all foreign literature, texts or trends, are reconfigured by its interaction with the national tradition, the afterlife of British Romanticism in China is distinguished by the radically divided and polarised responses it had received in the past century. This paper considers British Romanticism from several of its key aspects, namely, radicalism, self-expressiveness, and naturalism, and examines how each of them had been treated with drastically contradictory stances in China along with the conflicting ideologies taking turns dominating the Chinese centre stage. It also discusses the significance of the intermediary of Japanese, German, and Soviet sources in the Chinese reception of British Romanticism, and being twice removed from the original might have contributed to the predominant emphasis on what is without instead of what is within British Romantic poetry. Despite the consistently instrumentalist approach China had taken to British Romanticism, the paper concludes with the profound, though implicit, legacy British Romanticism had left in China. Almost all the leading modern Chinese poets who had participated in the formation of Chinese new (vernacular) poetry had been inspired in one way or another by their British fellow poets, who thereby inscribed their names on the Chinese poetic tradition. The remarkable tenacity of British Romanticism in surviving the trying circumstances in China derived, after all, from its power of poetry.

Image | Lord Byron by Richard Westall (1813)

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From DAMIN to the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
Featured Presentation: Georges Depeyrot

In 2011, the DAMIN program was launched with the aim of trying to understand the processes behind monetary and economic unifications during the 19th century. This program was a wide continuation of many previous cooperative bi- or trilateral programs focused on the relation within the Roman Empire and involving several countries in Europe and in Western Asia. All this previous research insisted on the fact that monetary unification, whatever the currency used, was always accompanied by economic unification.

The purpose of the DAMIN program was to link a large group of academics all around the world and to try to analyse and understand the evolution of the monetary system in the 19th century. At the beginning of the century, each country had its own monetary system and its own currency. But the general tendency was to unify the currency to facilitate the economic development and to facilitate trade, one of the necessities of the industrial revolution. Step by step, the main countries tried to develop multilateral treaties to facilitate means of payment, the most important of which was the Latin Monetary Union of December 1865 that made all the gold and silver coins issued by the signatory countries legal tender.

The subsequent discovery of the silver mines in the USA disturbed the LMU treaty and the countries were obliged to end the bimetallic system and to shift to the monometallic gold standard. The DAMIN program analysed these phenomena, and to date has seen more than 50 volumes published, hours of video footage, and conferences held all over the world. DAMIN has proved the necessity of large cooperative programs to link academics, as the only way to create the synergies necessary to analyse international economic trends and economic relations.

The DAMIN team is now to be included in the wider IAFOR Silk Road Initiative. The two programs are already very similar in that they both wish to understand the development of long distance trade and its consequences on all the aspects of human life. Trade is not only trade of artefacts but with the merchants, came languages, religions, arts, philosophies, and technology, and following trade came armies and invaders. With the Mongols going West, the Italians going East, and myriad other movements between, the Silk Road Initiative offers a fantastic field of analysis and reflection on the development of human societies, and the impact of contacts between populations, civilisations and cultures.

This presentation will offer an overview of the DAMIN project so far, and going forward as part of the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative.

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The Ceramic Road
Featured Presentation: Yutaka Mino

Through ceramics a strong bond developed linking East and West in the Middle Ages, that was also a bridge to promote cultures between East and West. This presentation will discuss and investigate this ‘Ceramic road’ by using examples of Chinese and Japanese ceramics now in Asia, the Near East, Europe and the United States.

The presentation will focus in particular on Fustat, the old Islamic city whose ruins now lie in the southern outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, and where an enormous number of fragments of Chinese ceramics were excavated. Dated from between the 10th to 18th centuries, it is fascinating to trace the many places through which the various vases and plates had passed, and to think about the thousands of miles they had traveled.

Image | 12th Century Bowl (Wan) with Peony, Chrysanthemum and Prunus Sprays

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Ikebana Workshop
Featured Workshop Presentation: Shoso Shimbo

The ongoing destruction of our environment by man-made pollution continues to push the world toward catastrophic consequences. The roots of some of these problems are often traced to the rise of Western modernity as well as the Western attitude to nature, where nature is objectified and exploited as a resource.

In response, we are seeing the emergence of an eco-centric perspective in contemporary art. Environmental artists have been using various approaches from focusing on raising awareness to searching for solutions or setting out a plan for social transformation.

Some of them have noted that certain non-Western cultures could inform a valuable shift in aesthetic experience. In many Indigenous cultures, nature often centres the members of a group by providing boundaries of behaviour, as well as access to sacred realms of enlightenment. While the idealisation of Indigenous cultures has been condemned, embracing them in art practice has generated not only fasciation (e.g. Hayao Miyazaki & Haruki Murakami) but also effective preservation of nature.

Can ikebana, as an art form with its origin in ancient Japan, provide any insights for contemporary environmental artists in their efforts to transform values and aesthetic sensibility?

In the 16th century, ikebana was defined as the symbolic representation of nature. It developed into an art form encompassing spiritual training in the pursuit of the harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature, regarding humans as part of nature.

However, the ikebana reform movement in 1930’s under the influence of the Western modernism declared ikebana to be only a form of art. Contemporary ikebana is still under the influence of that reformation, but a re-examination of the traditional values of ikebana might bring it into line with the aims of environmental art.

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Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia
Featured Panel Presentation: Yukari Yoshihara (Panel Chair), Hiromi Ochi, Hajime Saito and Jiyoung Kim

Literary studies, Asian studies and Area Studies in Asia as we understand now were invented and created in ruins after the World War II and in Japan’s accelerated reindustrialization after the Korean War, when Japan was a vanguard of Communist vs. Capitalist cultural Cold War front line. There are substantial examinations in the ways how creative writing, institutionalized academic study in literature and literary / creative writing education in the U.S. were heavily under the influence of the Cold War politics. There are some noteworthy works on American cultural diplomacy with Asia during the Cold War (such as Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils), yet, as of now, literature and related fields have not received due attention they deserve. To list, there were seven Japanese novelists and three Japanese critics were invited to the U.S. on the Rockefeller Foundation fund between 1953 and 62, with the purpose of making them understand “American way of life” and democratic values. Wallace Stegner, Stanford, initiated the Asian-American Literary Exchange (1949-54), and one of its achievements was English translation of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which won the Nobel Prize in 1967. Such cases indicate that it is vitally important to examine the geopolitical functions literary creation, literary studies and translation had in transpacific Cultural Cold War. 


Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Yukari Yoshihara

Seminar in the Ruins: The Saltzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Hiromi Ochi

Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s Hajime Saito

Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period Jiyoung Kim

Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
Featured Panel Presentation: Hiromi Ochi

In 1947 the School for American Studies in Salzburg, Austria, was held. It later acquired ample funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to be continued many years to come. Originally planned by Harvard University students who were concerned about the intellectual life of European people, the goal of the seminar was to promote “a free communication in ideas between Americans and Europeans,” which catered to the policy of Cold War cultural diplomacy that aimed to promote understanding between the U.S. and other countries. Prominent scholars from the United States, including F.O. Mathiessen, Alfred Kazin, Henry Nash Smith, Margaret Mead, and Talcot Parsons, taught and introduced “American Studies” to young scholars in the war-torn countries. The two Harvard scholars who participated in the first year, F.O. Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin, published their experiences the following year, with Kazin writing an article, “Seminar in the Ruins,” in the anti-Stalinist Commentary magazine, and Matthiessen a book, From the Heart of Europe, echoing the policy of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

The Seminar, which attracted students from various European countries, functioned as a model vehicle for the dissemination of American Studies, and generated similar seminars and lectures by prominent American scholars, such as the Stanford-Tokyo American Studies Seminar. This paper explores how these seminars functioned in the “ruined” countries, how they in turn contributed to developing American Studies and determining what should be taught, and how they were instrumental in nurturing a certain state of mind, through an analysis of reports by the attendants and essays by the “teachers” including Kazin and Matthiessen.

Image caption | Fellows of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (1947). Courtesy of Salzburg Global Seminar (Flickr).

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Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s
Featured Panel Presentation: Hajime Saito

An English poet, critic and editor of the “liberal” magazine Encounter, Stephen Spender was involved in the debate over Poems of Deadly Ashes (Shi No Hai Shishu). This was a 1954 anthology of Japanese poems written after the Lucky Dragon incident (1954) in which many Japanese fishermen were exposed to radiation due to USA’s Castle Bravo (H-Bomb) operation in Bikini Atoll and one of them subsequently died. Interestingly, one of Spender’s Japanese friends told about the publication of the anthology, and he wrote an article entitled “War, Peace and Poetry” in which he expressed his sympathy for the Japanese contributors who created poems in response to the victim of the incident but asked them to control their desire to speak publicly about the incident. As Akio Nosaka (2017) points out, Spender’s essay was quickly translated into Japanese and the translation was published in several Japanese poetry magazines to be read widely among Japanese readers who were interested in the debate over Poems of Deadly Ashes. Nosaka’s article is indispensable in order to understand the clandestine relationships between Spender and those who welcomed his essay among Japanese society in 1950’s, but it is not sufficient particularly in terms of what Spender did think and write about poetry and politics in his longer essays and books. My presentation mainly focuses on his important post-war literary criticism The Creative Element (1953), translated into Japanese in 1956 and 1957, so as to clarify his ideas about (Japanese genbaku) poems and politics in the atomic age. 

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Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period
Featured Panel Presentation: Jiyoung Kim

Hino Ashihei (1907-1960), one of the most popular Japanese writers during the wartime, is known for a series of ‘soldier novels’. After receiving the Akutagawa Prize in 1937, he was relocated to the information corps to accompany the Japanese army to the battle fronts of China and South Asia, and portray soldiers on battle field. His best-selling book, Mugi to Heitai (Soldier and Wheat, 1938) sold over a million copies and was translated into several languages. Hino’s reputation, however, dramatically reversed when the war ended with Japan’s defeat. During the Allied Occupation period, Hino was accused of war effort and was purged by GHQ.

Although little attention has been paid to Hino’s postwar writings, his literary career in the 1950’s is quite intriguing. He had traveled to India and China as a representative of Japanese literary circle to participate in international interchanges among writers. And in 1958, he traveled across America for two months. What he did and saw in America is well described in his travel essay Amerika Tankenki (1959). Strikingly, Hino in this essay clarifies that this visit was on the invitation from the U.S. Department of State. What does it imply and what had it bring about in Hino’s literature? In the 1950s, the U.S. government, in cooperation with private foundations, was promoting cultural interchanges between the U.S. and Japan to counter communist influence. My presentation attempts to analyse Hino’s visit to the U.S. together with Amerika Tankenki in the context of the U.S. cultural diplomacy during the cold war period.

Photo | Hino Ashihei

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Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century
Featured Panel Presentation: Steve Clark (Panel Chair), Myles Chilton, L. Ashley Squires, Michael O’Sullivan and John W P Phillips

The panel yesterday organised by Professor Yoshihara sought to situate the practice of English-learning and by extension the institutional model of Asian university in the broader context of Cold War politics. We hope to continue this discussion by examining how in the post-Cold War period (1990- ), English has increasingly established itself as a global (and therefore Asian) language, and considering ways in which the humanities may be regarded not as an obsolete importation from the Western academy but as a continually relevant site of disciplinary contestation and opportunity.

Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Steve Clark

Global English’s Centers of Conversation Myles Chilton

The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature L. Ashley Squires

Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities Michael O’Sullivan

Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption John W P Phillips

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Global English’s Centers of Consecration
Featured Panel Presentation: Myles Chilton

If you studied English in the Anglophone center, you probably learned the following: That postcolonial studies gave the first sustained arguments for seeing English literary studies against the legacies of Anglo-American canonical, critical, theoretical and ideological. They revealed how English literary studies produced a cultural formation detached from material reality and other modes of determination, while also seeking to overcome a Manichean view of the inheritance of empire through understanding the specific contexts where colonial economies and power relations shaped a middle class that sought an education in English as part of its autonomous self-definition. You might also have learned how world literature then took up the challenge, imagining a multi-centered discipline circulating in a web of collusion, collision and comparative aesthetics. Global English responded to this polycentrism by further complicating the colonial-postcolonial dynamic and challenging the assumption of Anglophone dominance over the whole diverse world of English-speakers. But out here beyond the center, learning how to recenter the discipline means learning anew the political dimensions of aesthetic response. Anglo-American identities cloak both ‘native’ faculty and the discipline itself, rendering calls for political consciousness, agency and responsibility – even those contained in the oblique, supposedly neutral act of textual criticism – calls for a radical re-thinking of the priorities of the humanities in an Asian context.

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The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature
Featured Panel Presentation: L. Ashley Squires

Reconfiguring our understanding of a literary canon around patterns and histories of reception rather than production, runs almost immediately into immense problems of scale and specificity. Scholars around the world may possess a keen understanding of how the canon is understood and taught in their particular locale, but scholarly gestures toward a shared global canon have always been necessarily speculative and provisional. I would suggest that big data analytics can help with this problem under the aegis of a reception-oriented turn by offering a view of his literature travels.

This presentation will feature my analysis of Google Trends data – a tool that allows us to compare patterns of search engine enquiries across regions and languages –on texts and authors represented in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. The main scholarly project of the field of American literature for much of the twenty-first century has, after all been to transcend national boundaries and situate itself more squarely in world literature, but these efforts have been mostly production focused and have rarely acknowledged that American literature as it is taught in the academy in the United States may not be what is recognised as the core of the American canon elsewhere. This data-driven approach allows me to examine what this looks like from elsewhere, to find localized canons of American literature outside of the United States that have been shaped by local and regional concerns about aesthetics, culture and politics. Some American texts are truly ‘worldly’ in that they are popular across a broad span of the globe, and texts that are truly migratory but they are not the ones that we might expect or wish. Furthermore, some American texts are essentially migratory in that the center of interest in that text or its author has genuinely moved beyond the national borders of the United States.

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Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities
Featured Panel Presentation: Michael O’Sullivan

How are we to understand the humanities – a field that more than any other must be mindful of differences – within global university strategies and systems of evaluation that rank universities according to criteria that lead to ever greater homogeneity? The process requires an openness to the difference of Asian humanities, a field that for Leo Ou-Fan Lee must have “Asian humanistic scholars” and “all humanistic scholars interested in Asia” re-examining and redefining Western philosophical theory (2010). Jana S. Rosker (2016) argues that intercultural research that includes Chinese philosophy must involve the ‘intercultural relativisation of the contents based on specific requirements of research in the Chinese philosophical tradition. With these arguments in mind, this paper explores how forty years after Said’s Orientalism, recentering English and the humanities can only take place through a glass darkly, or through an Asian-centered prism where a degree of ‘westernism’ is par for the course where scholars must begin to more readily reach for their Dao over their Derrida and their Fung Yu-Lan over their Foucault. Any re-centering if such a move is ever still imaginable can explore new conceptual frames of the intercultural humanities such notions as weakness, individualism and loneliness. One might also argue that the recognised increased economic and political power of China has not been matched by redefinition of Asian academic discourses, schools and practices in terms of intellectual and pedagogic traditions of the historically dominant culture of these regions.

Read presenter biographies.

Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption
Featured Panel Presentation: John W P Phillips

A recent calculation suggests that it will take no more than three years to train workers, including professionals, managers, executives, and technicians (PMETs) in preparation for vertiginous career shifts, when their skills are displaced by the demands of the future, as forecasters assure us will happen. One new field, indeed, involves compiling and computing data on company investments, to predict the jobs that these investments will create. Various departments of future skills and training have begun to work with universities in creating modules designed to prepare workers for this critically uncertain future job market.

At the same time, independent agencies are employed by the universities to provide modules that prepare students for future readiness, and which supplement the turn, already underway in the arts and humanities, towards applied learning, skills based education, and the instrumental and vocational training that ministries of education prefer in face of the challenge of the future.

While available funding for humanities doctoral programmes shrinks a little more each year, funds are awarded instead to innovative projects that rethink the classical MA programme in future ready mode, or that explore existing pedagogic resources on the internet for the possibilities of fruitful parasitism within a department programme.

One might think that under these changing conditions the disciplines of the arts and humanities are once again under fire, in danger of dissolution, the humanities in Asia mutating beyond sustainable development. But the theme of lifelong learning, the introduction all over Asia (certainly in Singapore and China) of liberal arts based programmes, the continuing progress and growth of performance studies, fine art, and literature, offer a different picture. Literary theory, whose pyrrhic victory in the global university rendered it almost worthless as a critical force for many years, is currently revealed as a powerful analytic vehicle for dealing with the current situation.

I will begin by identifying two connected trends: defensive strategies against the threat of future technical disruption; and relocation of funding within the humanities. Beyond the so called digital humanities, a critical media theory marked by its historical understanding of languages and algorithms, and with roots in classical critical theory, can take up the challenge typically assigned to the university, especially when called upon to recenter itself in an Asian context to an age uniquely dominated by disruptive technologies and unsettling economic exigencies.

Read presenter biographies.

IAFOR Silk Road Initiative
Information Session

As an organization, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In 2018, we are excited to launch a major new and ambitious international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research initiative which uses the silk road trade routes as a lens through which to study some of the world’s largest historical and contemporary geopolitical trends, shifts and exchanges.

IAFOR is headquartered in Japan, and the 2018 inauguration of this project aligns with the 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan opened its doors to the trade and ideas that would precipitate its rapid modernisation and its emergence as a global power. At a time when global trends can seem unpredictable, and futures fearful, the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative gives the opportunity to revisit the question of the impact of international relations from a long-term perspective.

This ambitious initiative will encourage individuals and institutions working across the world to support and undertake research centring on the contact between countries and regions in Europe and Asia – from Gibraltar to Japan – and the maritime routes that went beyond, into the South-East Continent and the Philippines, and later out into the Pacific Islands and the United States. The IAFOR Silk Road Initiative will be concerned with all aspects of this contact, and will examine both material and intellectual traces, as well as consequences.

For more information about the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative, click here.

IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017
Award Winners Screening

The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) in 2015 as an international photography award that seeks to promote and assist in the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists. The award has benefitted since the outset from the expertise of an outstanding panel of internationally renowned photographers, including Dr Paul Lowe as the Founding Judge, and Ed Kashi, Monica Allende, Simon Roberts, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Simon Norfolk and Emma Bowkett as Guest Judges. Now in its third year, the award has already been widely recognised by those in the industry and has been supported by World Press Photo, Metro Imaging, MediaStorm, Think Tank Photo, University of the Arts London, RMIT University, British Journal of Photography, The Centre for Documentary Practice, and the Medill School of Journalism.

As an organisation, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In keeping with this mission, in appreciation of the great value of photography as a medium that can be shared across borders of language, culture and nation, and to influence and inform our academic work and programmes, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched as a competition that would help underline the importance of the organisation’s aims, and would promote and recognise best practice and excellence.

Winners of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017 were announced at The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2017 (EuroMedia2017) in Brighton, UK. The award follows the theme of the EuroMedia conference, with 2017’s theme being “History, Story, Narrative”. In support of up-and-coming talent, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award is free to enter.

Access to the Award Winners Screening is included in the conference registration fee. For more information about the award, click here.

Image | From the project Single Mothers of Afghanistan by IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017 Grand Prize Winner, Kiana Hayeri.

Myles Chilton
Nihon University, Japan

Biography

Myles Chilton (BA University of Toronto; MA and PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Nihon University. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Chilton has been in Japan for over twenty years, writing about relationships between contemporary world literature and global cities in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and in journal articles such as Comparative Critical Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He also focuses on global English and literary studies in such books as the monograph English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (Routledge 2016); and in chapters in the books The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Literature (Routledge 2015), Deterritorializing Practices in Literary Studies (Contornos 2014), and World Literature and the Politics of the Minority (Rawat 2013). Chilton has also presented papers on these and other topics at universities around the world. He is also on the editorial board of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Global English’s Centers of Consecration

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Steve Clark
University of Tokyo, Japan

Biography

Steve Clark is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, and in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Tokyo, Japan. He received both a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, then was a British Academy postdoc and fellow of the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, UK. He taught at Osaka and Nara before moving to the University of Tokyo. His many publications include Paul Ricoeur (Routledge, 1990), Travel-Writing and Empire (ZED, 1999), Reception of Blake in the Orient (Continuum, 2006), and Asian Crossings: Travel-Writing on China, Japan and South-East Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2008). His most recent book, co-edited with Tristanne Connolly, is British Romanticism in a European Perspective (Palgrave 2015). He has also written a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as reviews for such publications as the Times Literary Supplement. He has either organised or co-organised conferences in both Japan and the United Kingdom, including the recent Romantic Connections and Pacific Gateways conferences, both at the University of Tokyo.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century
Georges Depeyrot
French National Center for Scientific Research, France

Biography

Georges Depeyrot is a monetary historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He began his scientific career in the 1970s studying coin finds and joined the CNRS in 1982. After some years he joined the Center for Historical Research in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and is now a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. After his habilitation (1992), he specialised in international cooperative programs that aim to reconsider monetary history in a global approach. He has directed many cooperative programs linking several European countries, including those situated at the continent’s outer borders (Georgia, Armenia, Russia, and Morocco). Professor Depeyrot is the author or co-author of more than one hundred volumes, and is the founding director of the Moneta publishing house, the most important collection of books on the topic of money. Professor Depeyrot is a member of the board of trustees of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.

Featured Presentation (2018) | From DAMIN to the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Jiyoung Kim
Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea

Biography

Jiyoung Kim is a researcher in Sungkyun Institute for Japanese Studies at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea.​ ​She has been working extensively on “America” in post-war Japanese literature. Her current research involves the study of U.S.-Japan Cultural Interchange in the Cold War period.

Her publications include: "Post-Kowaki no Nichibei Bunka Koryu to Bungaku Kukan: Rockefeller Zaidan no Sosaku Fellowship o Shiza ni "(The U.S.-Japan Cultural Interchange Program and Japanese Literary Scene in the Post-Peace Treaty Period : A Study of the Rockefeller Foundation's Creative Fellowship), America Taiheiyo Kenkyu, 2015 [in Japanese]; Agawa Hiroyuki ni okeru Genbaku no Shudai to America (America in Agawa Hiroyuki's Writings about Hiroshima), Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu, 2013 [in Japanese].

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period
Eun Kyung Min
Seoul National University, South Korea

Biography

Dr Eun Kyung Min is Professor of English at Seoul National University where she has taught since 1998. A specialist in eighteenth-century British literature, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her research interests include Enlightenment ethics and aesthetics, the history of literary canon formation, and early modern cultural history; she is also interested in Asian literature in English, Asian American Literature, and Asian cultural production in general. Her book China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690-1770 is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (April 2018). Dr Min has published articles on eighteenth-century British literature in such journals as The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Essays and Studies, and ELH (English Literary History). Her work on Adam Smith appears in The Adam Smith Review as well as a book collection entitled The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (Routledge 2002). She has also published essays on Korean and Korean American literature in the journal Social Text and two book collections, Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color (University of Illinois Press 1998) and The Politics of English (John Benjamins 2013).

Keynote Presentation (2018) | “The Prospect ... towards the East”: Reorienting Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Yutaka Mino
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan

Biography

Dr Yutaka Mino was born in Kanazawa, Japan, in 1941, and received his PhD in Art History from Harvard University, in 1977. He was appointed associate curator in charge of the Asiatic Department at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in 1976, the curator of the Oriental Art Department at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in 1977, and the curator of the Asian Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1985. After Returning to Japan, he was named as the director of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, in 1996, and as the founding director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in 2004. In 2007, he became the Vice Chairman, Sotheby’s North America, the Chief Executive Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Honorary Director, Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. In April 2010, he was appointed as the director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, and in 2012, the director of Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, he was named Honorary Director, Abeno Harukas Museum of Art. Yutaka Mino has organized many exhibitions, and also published individual books and catalogs such as Freedom of Clay and Brush Through Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz’u-chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D. in 1980, and Hakuji (White Ware), vol.5 in the Chugoku Togi (Chinese Ceramics) series in 1998.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Museum Cultivates Aesthetic Sensibility

Previous Presentations

Featured Presentation (2018) | The Ceramic Road
Featured Presentation (2017) | Art and Narrative in the Public Sphere
Hiromi Ochi
Hitotsubashi University, Japan

Biography

Hiromi Ochi is a professor in the Department of Commerce and Management at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan. She has been interested in the literature of the American South and Cold War cultural diplomacy. Her publications include: Modernism no Nanbuteki Shunkan: America Nanbu Shijin to Reisen (Southern Moment of Modernism: Southern Poets and the Cold War) (Kenkyusha, 2012) [in Japanese]; and “Democratic Bookshelf: American Libraries in Occupied Japan” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. Eds. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) :89-111.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
Michael O’Sullivan
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Biography

Dr Michael O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities
Li Ou
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Biography

Li Ou is Associate Professor at Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and Negative Capability (London: Continuum, 2009), ‘Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine’ (Romanticism 22:2 (2016), 167-76), and ‘Keats’s Afterlife in Twentieth-Century China’ (English Romanticism in East Asia: A Romantic Circles PRAXIS Volume, ed. Suh-Reen Han). Her research interests include Romantic poetry and cultural/literary relations between China and Britain.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected
John W P Phillips
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Biography

Dr John W P Phillips teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He has published on aesthetics, critical theory, deconstruction, linguistics, literature, military technology, philosophy, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and urbanism. He is author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory, co-author of Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception. He is co-editor of several volumes, including: Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global processes; Beyond Description: Space, Historicity, Singapore; and The New Encyclopaedia Project, Volume I, Problematizing Global Knowledge (2006), and Volume II, Megacities (2011). Among recent activities he is editor of Derrida Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption
Hajime Saito
University of Tsukuba, Japan

Biography

Hajime Saito is an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. He has been reading Joseph Conrad novels and also studying why many Japanese readers loved reading English literature when Japan was an empire. Now he focuses on the politics of English and American literary studies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His publications include: Teikoku Nihon no Eibungaku (English Literary Studies in Imperial Japan) (Jimbun Shoin, 2006) [in Japanese]; and "Embracing Hiroshima", Journal of East-West Thought, September 2016: 91-101.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s
Shoso Shimbo
RMIT University, Australia

Biography

Shoso Shimbo PhD is a certified teacher of Ikebana and has 30 years experience in Ikebana. Shoso was selected by Belle magazine as one of six “Australia’s top floral designers” and has won multiple awards including the Gold Award at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show. His works were selected for the prestigious publication, International Floral Art (Stichting Kunstboek) in 2014/2015 & 2016/2017 editions.

His sculptural works have been featured in some of the nation’s major contemporary art exhibitions. His recent commissions includes a public work of art for the Archibald Award Exhibition 2015 at the Art Gallery of Ballarat and the Wye River project as a part of the Lorne Sculpture 2016.

Shoso has an MA in Japanese Studies, a Master of Fine Art and PhD in Education. He is also qualified as a garden designer. He is a directer of International Society of Ikebana Studies and he teaches “Japanese Aesthetics: From Ikebana to Contemporary Art” at RMIT University Short Courses.

Featured Presentation (2018) | Ikebana Workshop
Ashley Squires
New Economic School, Russia

Biography

Dr Ashley Squires is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the New Economic School in Moscow, Russian Federation. Her prior research covers the intersections of American literary and religious history and the medical humanities, with a particular focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current work brings the digital humanities to bear on the reception of American literature outside of the United States and on the reception of naturalist authors in the former Soviet Union. She is the author of Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science, published by Indiana University Press in 2017, and articles appearing in Book History, Studies in the Novel, and American Literary Realism.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature
Yukari Yoshihara
University of Tsukuba, Japan

Biography

Yukari Yoshihara is an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and a board member of the Asian Shakespeare Association. Her publications include “Toward Reciprocal Legitimation between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga” (2016), “Tacky Shakespeare in Japan” (2013), “The First Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism” (2012), and the “Introduction” to English Studies in Asia (2007). She convened the Robinson Crusoe in Asia conference in 2014 at University of Tsukuba. A dedicated fan of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, she was interviewed by BBC Toronto as to why Anne is the most popular red-head in Japan. Enthusiastic about creating spaces where pop culture meets high culture, she organised the 1st Graphic Shakespeare Competition in 2016 and is to convene the 2nd GSC in 2018. Her current project is on Anglophone literature in Cold War Asia.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia
Myles Chilton
Nihon University, Japan

Biography

Myles Chilton (BA University of Toronto; MA and PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Nihon University. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Chilton has been in Japan for over twenty years, writing about relationships between contemporary world literature and global cities in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and in journal articles such as Comparative Critical Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He also focuses on global English and literary studies in such books as the monograph English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (Routledge 2016); and in chapters in the books The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Literature (Routledge 2015), Deterritorializing Practices in Literary Studies (Contornos 2014), and World Literature and the Politics of the Minority (Rawat 2013). Chilton has also presented papers on these and other topics at universities around the world. He is also on the editorial board of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Global English’s Centers of Consecration

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Steve Clark
University of Tokyo, Japan

Biography

Steve Clark is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, and in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Tokyo, Japan. He received both a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, then was a British Academy postdoc and fellow of the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, UK. He taught at Osaka and Nara before moving to the University of Tokyo. His many publications include Paul Ricoeur (Routledge, 1990), Travel-Writing and Empire (ZED, 1999), Reception of Blake in the Orient (Continuum, 2006), and Asian Crossings: Travel-Writing on China, Japan and South-East Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2008). His most recent book, co-edited with Tristanne Connolly, is British Romanticism in a European Perspective (Palgrave 2015). He has also written a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as reviews for such publications as the Times Literary Supplement. He has either organised or co-organised conferences in both Japan and the United Kingdom, including the recent Romantic Connections and Pacific Gateways conferences, both at the University of Tokyo.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century
Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s current research concentrates on post-war and contemporary politics and international affairs, and since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the College of Education of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (USA).

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Yukari Yoshihara
University of Tsukuba, Japan

Biography

Yukari Yoshihara is an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and a board member of the Asian Shakespeare Association. Her publications include “Toward Reciprocal Legitimation between Shakespeare’s Works and Manga” (2016), “Tacky Shakespeare in Japan” (2013), “The First Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism” (2012), and the “Introduction” to English Studies in Asia (2007). She convened the Robinson Crusoe in Asia conference in 2014 at University of Tsukuba. A dedicated fan of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, she was interviewed by BBC Toronto as to why Anne is the most popular red-head in Japan. Enthusiastic about creating spaces where pop culture meets high culture, she organised the 1st Graphic Shakespeare Competition in 2016 and is to convene the 2nd GSC in 2018. Her current project is on Anglophone literature in Cold War Asia.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia