faculty profiles

 

Professors:

  • Nicola Tannenbaum, Ph.D. (Iowa), Program Director, Sociology and Anthropology
  • Constance Cook, Ph.D. (U.C., Berkeley), Modern Languages and Literature
  • Norman Girardot, Ph.D. (Chicago), Religion Studies
  • Kenneth Kraft, Ph.D. (Princeton), Religion Studies
  • David Pankenier, Ph.D. (Stanford), Modern Languages and Literature
  • Raymond Wylie, Ph.D. (London, England), International Relations

Associate Professors:

  • Gail Cooper, Ph.D. (U.C., Santa Barbara), History
  • Michael Mendelson, Ph.D. (San Diego), Philosophy
  • Kiri Lee, Ph.D. (Harvard), Modern Languages and Literature
  • Amardeep Singh, Ph.D.(Duke), English

Assistant Professors:

  • Robert Rozehnal, Ph. D. (Duke), Religion Studies
  • Yuping Zhang, Ph. D. (U of Penn),Sociology and Anthropology

 

Dr. Constance A. Cook

Asian Studies Program Director
Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literature.

website



Dr. Amardeep Singh

Department: English
AS Field: South Asian Literature, Religion and Literature
Books: The Satanic Verses by Saman Rushdie, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said, Critique of Postcolonial Reason by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Favorite Quote: "Being God's postman is no fun, yaar" (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses)

website

Hooked on Asian Studies because: Some of the most exciting literature in the world today is being written in or about the Indian Subcontinent. Issues such as ethno-religious conflicts, religious fundamentalism, and the politics of globalization/development are ones I feel all of us have to understand and deal with.

Interests: I'm working on a book on the nature of secularism in a global frame. Accordingly, I'm especially interested in the bistory of the Indian/Pakistani partition, the connections between religion and nationalism in different South Asian countries, and the representation of women in religion, among other things. I also have a "serious" interest in Hindi films and South Asian popular music.




Dr. David W. Pankenier

Department: Modern Languages & literature
AS Field: China: language, culture, history of ideas, archaeology, contemporary affairs
Books: The Yi Jing or Book of Changes, Iron & Silk by Saltzman, The Question of Hu by Spence
Favorite Quote: "What is extraordinary is not that China had no Scientific Revolution, but that the Scientific Revolution occurred at all." (Albert Einstein)

website

Hooked on Asian Studies because: Desire to know what difference it would make to operate in a linguistic environment that uses characters rather than an alphabet.

Interests: Chinese antiques, astral lore, out-of-the-way places

more profiles to come...