(2015-present)
(All posts, except for Incoming President, start at the end of the AAA annual meeting in November)
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President Glenda S. ROBERTS (Waseda University Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies) http://www.waseda.jp/gsaps/en/about/faculty/roberts-glenda-s/ President 2017-2019, Incoming President 2015-2017, Bestor Award Committee Chair 2016-2017robertsglendas[at]gmail.com Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies of Waseda University in Tokyo, her main areas of research are gender, family, and work in contemporary Japan, and immigration policy under demographic decline. She has authored Staying on the Line: Blue-Collar Women in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 1994) as well as Japan’s Evolving Family: Voices from Young Urban Adults Navigating Change (East-West Center, 2016), and co-edited several volumes, including, with Mike Douglass, Japan and Global Migration (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), and, with Satsuki Kawano and Susan O. Long, eds., Capturing Contemporary Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014). Currently she is on sabbatical leave at the EHESS in Paris, where she is doing joint research with Hiroko Umegaki on work-life balance and well-being for families in France. She will be back in Tokyo in September 2018 after finishing her sabbatical at the University of Hawaii’s Center for Japanese Studies and the East-West Center. |
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Incoming President Sonia RYANG (Rice University) Incoming President 2017-2019sonia.ryang[at] rice.edu Sonia Ryang is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies in Rice University. Her research interests are clustered around the issues of ethnological study of cultural logic and fundamental principle of a society, interactions between humans and the environment (including non-human animals and food), scientific knowledge, and social justice. She is particularly interested in anthropological study of North Korea on the one hand and scientific collaboration across national borders traversing Asia and the US on the other. |
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Past President Gordon MATHEWS (Chinese University of Hong Kong) http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/gordon/ Past President 2017-2019, President, 2015-2017cmgordon[at]cuhk.edu.hk Gordon Mathews is professor and chair of the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His most recent book is The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace, together with Linessa Lin Dan and Yang Yang (2017, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Other titles include What Makes Life Worth Living: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Kit-wai Ma and Tai-lok Lui), and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011). He has co-edited books on consumption in Hong Kong, the Japanese generation gap, the pursuit of happiness globally, and economic globalization from below. Future projects include writing a book on life after death in Japan, China, and the United States. |
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Secretary Carolyn STEVENS (Monash University) http://profiles.arts.monash.edu.au/carolyn-stevens/ Secretary 2015-2018, SEAA column co-editor 2005-2008carolyn.stevens[at]monash.edu Carolyn Stevens is Professor of Japanese Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research to date has focused on the following themes disability, social welfare and maternal and child health care in Japan; and Japanese popular music, 1950s to present. She also has an interest more widely in sensory anthropology, and sound in Japan. New title, The Beatles in Japan. Routledge (2018). |
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Treasurer Susan BROWNELL (University of Missouri-St. Louis) www.umsl.edu/divisions/artscience/anthro/Faculty/susanbrownell.html www.amazon.com/author/susanbrownell Treasurer, 2016-2019sbrownell[at]umsl.edu Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an expert on sports in China and has published multiple works about the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. She is also interested in world’s fairs and did research on the Shanghai World Expo 2010. Her interests are in the body, gender, nationalism, transnationalism, and mega-events. |
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Councilor Eleana KIM (University of California, Irvine) http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/eleanakim/ Councilor 2015-2018eleana.kim[at]uci.edu Eleana Kim is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing are organized around core anthropological concerns with nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood and social value. Her past and ongoing projects include transnational adoption from South Korea, the ecologies of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and transnational circulations of medicinal ginseng. |
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Councilor Priscilla SONG (Washington University in St. Louis) http://anthropology.artsci.wustl.edu/song_priscilla Councilor 2015-2018priscillasong[at]wustl.edu Priscilla Song is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the nexus of medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and China studies. Her book Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/11028.html) illuminates how transnational journeys for fetal cell cures become tangled in complex webs of digital mediation, entrepreneurial logics of postsocialist medicine, and fraught debates about the ethics of clinical experimentation. Her current research examines the culture and ethics of end-of-life care technologies in the context of China’s rapidly aging population. |
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Councilor Shao-hua LIU (Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica) http://idv.sinica.edu.tw/shaohua/indexE.htm Councilor 2016-2019shaohua[at]sinica.edu.twLiu Shao-hua is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research uses AIDS, drug use, leprosy, or environment issues as the vantage point to analyze the nature and trajectories of contemporary social change in China and Taiwan, as well as individuals’ life experiences and transformations within social change. |
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Councilor Ayako TAKAMORI (Marylhurst University) Councilor 2016-2019atakamori[at]marylhurst.edu Ayako Takamori is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary and Applied Liberal Arts at Marylhurst University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is driven by an enduring interest in how belonging and identities are negotiated and mediated across borders and in post-conflict contexts. Areas of interest include comparative race and ethnicity, transnationalism and globalization, gender and sexuality, and media and visual cultures. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Traversing Borders: Japanese American Transpacific Positionings, about Japanese American ethnic formations in Japan. |
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Councilor John CHO (Sarah Lawrence College) Councilor 2017-2020songpaecho [at]gmail.com John (Song Pae) Cho is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His publications include “The Wedding Banquet Revisited: ‘Contract Marriages’ Between Korean Gays and Lesbians” (2009). His research interests include transnational LGBT studies, neoliberalism, and the Internet. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, The Luxury of Love: South Korean Gay Men, Internet, and the National Cybercloset, about LGBT community building in 21st century Seoul. |
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Councilor Gavin WHITELAW (Harvard University) Councilor 2017-2020whitelaw[at] fas.harvard.edu Gavin H. Whitelaw is a sociocultural anthropologist and Executive Director of Harvard University’s Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. His research focuses on issues of globalization, commerce, work, food, and consumer culture particularly in the context of contemporary Japan. Prior to coming to the Reischauer Institute, he was Senior Associate Professor of Anthropology and Japan Studies at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo. His writings have appeared in journals including Anthropology of Work Review, Gastronomica and Contemporary Japan, and most recently in the edited volume, Capturing Contemporary Japan (Hawai’i 2014). |
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Student Councilor
Jing WANG 王菁 (Rice University) jw28[at]rice.edu Jing Wang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Rice University. Her broad research interests are historical imagination, anthropology of state, urban development, social movement, ethnic community, documentary production, and modern Chinese art. Her dissertation project (July 2015 – July 2016) focuses on the Chinese state’s ongoing promotion of domestic multiculturalist policies through exploring the way it mobilizes cosmopolitan imaginaries of the “New Silk Road.” |
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Student Councilor Yukun ZENG (University of Chicago) https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/students/ Student Councilor 2017-2020zengy [at]uchicago.edu Yukun Zeng is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at University of Chicago. His research focuses on the revitalization of traditional Confucian education in contemporary China. The major research question for his dissertation project is how traditional Confucian literacy and educational practices re-articulate Chinese parents’ concern for their children and how these Confucian ways are adopted as (alternative) educational, religious, or other social space, given the sociopolitical situation and value landscape in contemporary China. |
Program Editor for SEAA in the 2018 Annual Meeting of the AAA
Priscilla Song (Washington University-St. Louis), priscillasong[at]wustl.edu
SEAA Column Editors (AAA Newsletter) (Appointed by the Board)
 Heidi LAM (Yale University)(see SEAA communications team, below) |
 Yi ZHOU (UC Davis)http://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/people/yi-zhou |
SEAA Digital Communications (Web, FB, Twitter) (Appointed by the Board)
Heidi K. LAM, Yale University, heidi.lam[at]yale.edu
https://heidiklam.wordpress.com
Heidi K. Lam is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Yale University. She specializes in Japan, tourism, popular entertainment, the performing arts, and the political economy of the culture industry. Her dissertation project ethnographically examines the experiences generated within commercial heritage-themed spaces in Japan, especially during the most recent wave of touristic promotion. Focusing on frontline encounters among the staff, tourists, and other kinds of visitors, the project questions the company’s employment of bodily engagement (taiken) and role-play for cultural communication and their unanticipated effects.
Priscilla SONG, Ph.D., priscillasong[at]wustl.edu
Washington University in St. Louis
http://pages.wustl.edu/song
(see SEAA councilor profile above)
Guven WITTEVEEN, Ph.D., anthroview[at]gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/anthroview
Guven Witteveen completed a year as applied anthropologist at Science Craft, an emergency management consulting company in Japan and now works on project-based assignments, evaluation and consulting. His interests include visual anthropology, disaster ethnography, museum studies and public outreach education, local history representation and citizen movements, as well as producing materials for foreign language learning.
Yi ZHOU, yizhou[at]ucdavis.edu
http://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/people/yi-zhou
Yi Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on digital media, affective labor, and governmentality in China.