Let’s cheer for our colleagues contributing to their fields through publications:
 
PhD Candidate Jahnabi Chanchani writes in to share that her article “Preaching and Preening: A Tuti’s Book in Persianate India” was just published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 
 
Syed Ali, Director of the South Asian Language Program, reports that a collaborative book chapter entitled “Articulating Visions of South Asian LCTL Instructions for Sustainable Growth” has been accepted for publication in the volume Sharing LCTLs in Higher Education: Collaboration and Innovation. The contributing authors are Mithilesh Mishra (UIUC), Shaheen Praveen (Rutgers University), Sarah Beckham (UW-Madison), of course, Syed. The volume is forthcoming from Taylor and Francis.
 
Lastly, a shout-out to our Assistant Professors, who have had a bumper year in terms of monographs. Dave Brick’s Widows Under Hindu Law came out in late March, and Se-Mi Oh’s City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism appeared earlier this week. SE Kile’s Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Chinese Media is out today!

Please join me in congratulating our colleagues on the following achievements:
 
Vietnamese lecturer ThuyAnh Nguyen was one of six recipients university-wide of funding from the Center for Academic Innovation to support work with educational technology. For more information on her project, check out the article in The Record.
 
Yoshihiro Mochizuki, Japanese language lecturer, has recently achieved two significant academic milestones. First, he has been selected as one of the three co-directors of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ). The 2023 AATJ Annual Spring Conference was held on Thursday, March 16, 2023, in Boston, in conjunction with the 2023 Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting. He will also be the keynote speaker at the fourth Northwest Conference on Japanese Pedagogy, which will be held at the University of Washington on May 20-21, 2023. His keynote speech, titled “Empowering Teachers: Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Japanese Language Classrooms,” aims to raise awareness of the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and social justice in the Japanese language classroom. He will provide participants with a better understanding of the negative impact of unconscious bias and microaggressions on students’ learning experiences.
 
Se-Mi Oh has been awarded a Fulbright US Scholar fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year to work on her new project titled “The Han River: A Story of Urban Planning and Ecology.” She also gave a book talk about City of Sediments at George Washington University on March 27.

Premlata Pinki Vaishnava reports a busy spring. In February, she delivered an invited talk at the "LangLit Teaching, Learning and Innovations: Pedagogic Issues and Remedies" conference organized by the Centre for Language Studies, P. P. Savani University, Gujarat India. Following this, she participated in and was a session chair at f(ASAL): The 13 th (formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages Conference, Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, March-April 2023.
 
Thai lecturer Aimkamon Bunmee shares that she passed the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Oral Proficiency Interview in February and is now a certified ACTFL OPI Tester for Thai language.
 
In January, Qian Liu and Xiaoying Yu were awarded Third Prize in the Chinese for Specific Purposes Lesson Plan Contest at the 2nd International Symposium on Chinese for Specific Purposes (CSP).

Student Housing has named Japanese lecturer Yamato Kitahashi an Honored Instructor.

Read on to learn about graduate student and faculty outreach and/or media appearances:
 
PhD candidate Linh Trinh has appeared in the news twice this year, sharing her expertise in Vietnamese food history. You can find her in an Associated Press article and the Serious Eats blog.

Hear Miranda Brown talk about the history of dairy in premodern China–and lactose intolerance–on a popular food history podcast, Eat This Podcast.

Premlata Vaishnava relates that Anand Patwardhan, India’s leading documentary filmmaker and member of the Oscar academy whose films have earned 20 international awards, visited Advanced Hindi in Fall 2022 where students had an engaging conversation with him about his award-winning films on geopolitical, sociocultural, literary and other crucial issues of South Asia.
 
In other JLP News, the JLP Oka Tadoku Room representative, Yamato Kitahashi and Tadoku room intern Jack Gisondi held Tadoku events every month in Fall 2022 and Winter 2023. With 6 events this semester and an average of 20 students participating, this programming has been well-received and highly appreciated by our students.

TONIGHT!: The ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan would like to invite you to a Workshop and Demo with Filipino Martial Artists Tuhon Rommel Tortal and Francis Estrada, two highly respected instructors in Pekiti-Tirsia Kali (PTK), a traditional Filipino martial art indigenous to the Visayan Region of the Philippines. PTK emphasizes practical self-defense using both bladed and empty-hand techniques. It is known for its fluid and efficient movements and focuses on close-quarters combat scenarios.
 
The event will take place April 14, 2023, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM in South Thayer Building 2022 (202 South Thayer Street, Ann Arbor, 48104). It will include a lecture, demo/workshop, and the opportunity to interact with artifacts from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Light refreshments will also be served. In addition to street parking, spaces will be available for a small fee at the Thayer Street parking structure located at 216 South Thayer Street.

ReConnect/ReCollect is a two-year project funded by the Humanities Collaboratory to develop a framework and practices for culturally-responsive and historically-minded stewardship of the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan. 

This semester, ALC hosted and/or co-sponsored several events. The department started a busy spring strech co-sponsoring the MEMS (Medieval and Early Modern Studies) Spring Lecture on March 10, which featured Dr. Jacqueline Stone (Princeton University). Professor Stone shared her recent work in a talk titled “In the Aftermath of the Divine Winds: Religious Responses to the Mongol Threat and the Medieval Reimagining of Japan.”

The above talk was followed just a few days later by the Luis Gómez Memorial Lecture on March 15. This year’s speaker was Dr. Patrick Pranke (University of Louisville); he spoke on “Saints, Sorcerers and Scholar Monks: Extraordinary Persons in the Mythology and History of Modern Burmese Buddhism.”

ALC also had two departmental colloquia. On March 22, ThuyAnh Nguyen shared her experiences creating an inclusive classroom in a presentation called “The IDEAL world with 3V (The Inclusive Diverse Equitable and Accessible Learning world with Versatile Virtual Vietnamese).” Anyone who would like to view ThuyAnh’s slides, which include several useful resources, should please click here. Our final colloquium, on April 7, was led by Jahnabi Chanchani: her presentation, which featured research she plans to develop after her dissertation, was called “The Rāmcaritmānas: Where Birds, Caste, and Salvation Discourse Meet.”

Wrapping up our events section, Youngju Ryu reports that on April 10, 2023, Dong Yeon Kim, governor of the largest province in South Korea, visited U-M to deliver the 2023 Sang-Yong Nam Memorial Lecture entitled "Merry Revolt: A Proposal for Twenty-First Century Korea." The lecture was preceded by the celebration of ALC student Olivia Daniel (Asian Studies Minor) as the winner of the 11th Sang-Yong Nam Award. During the visit, Governor Kim also met with Provost Laurie McCauley to sign an agreement for sustained collaboration between U-M and Gyeonggi Province to increase opportunities for international education for students in under-resourced communities.