Faculty Seminar / Professional Development
Sponsored by Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and Dept. of English
“A&Q: Multidisciplinarity and the Study of Global Asias”
Friday, February 27, 2015
1:00 – 3:00 PM
Stern Lounge, CLAS / Austin Building Room 217
Our invited guest for this “responsive dialog” is Tina Chen, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Penn State University, and Senior Editor of the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Co-chair of the East of California caucus, Association for Asian American Studies, and Executive Board member of the MLA’s Division on Asian American Literature, Dr. Chen is the author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.
The Seminar will focus on selected essays from the inaugural issue of Verge. Contact the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute for the seminar reading.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias showcases scholarship on Asian topics from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that the changing scope of “Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of vital critical concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist (national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global) modes. Responding to the ways in which large-scale social, cultural, and economic concepts like the world, the globe, or the universal (not to mention East Asian cousins like tianxia or datong) are reshaping the ways we think about the present, the past and the future, the journal publishes scholarship that occupies and enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and historical fields, from the ancient to the modern periods. The journal emphasizes multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the disciplines that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make possible new conversations and new models of critical thought. The first issue will be published in Spring 2015.
For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu