Laos

The Harvard-Yenching Library is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. Although as an organized library it dates only from 1928, the collection can trace its beginnings back to 1879, when Chinese was first offered as part of Harvard University's regular curriculum. In that year a group of Bostonians engaged in the China trade invited Ge Kunhua 戈鯤化, a Chinese scholar from the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, to give instruction in Chinese at Harvard. The small collection of books that was bought for his courses, the first acquisitions in any East Asian language at the Harvard College Library, marked the beginning of a Chinese collection.

The Library's Asian collection began in 1869 with a gift of 10 works in 933 volumes from the emperor of China to the United States. Spanning a diversity of subjects from China, Japan, Korea, the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, the Library's Asian collections have become one of the most accessible and comprehensive sources of Asian language materials in the world. For further information about the collection, visit the Asian Division's Web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/asian/

The Asian Division Friends Society announces the Florence Tan Moeson Research Fellowship for 2009. This fellowship is made possible by a generous donation of Florence Tan Moeson, for 43 years a Chinese Team cataloger in the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division before she retired in 2001.

The purpose of the fellowship is to give individuals the opportunity to use the Asian collections in the Library of Congress, which are among the most significant outside of Asia and consist of nearly 2.8 million books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts and microforms in the languages of East, South and Southeast Asia.

Researchers wishing to submit applications should go to this Web site: www.lcasianfriends.org/fellowship.

TRAVEL GRANT PROGRAM
HARVARD-YENCHING LIBRARY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The Harvard-Yenching Library’s Travel Grant Program is designed to assist scholars from outside the metropolitan Boston area in their use of Harvard-Yenching's collections for research. Priority consideration is given to those at institutions where there are no or few library resources in the East Asian languages, and no major East Asian library collections are available nearby.

CALL FOR PAPERS
How might the understanding of “East Asia” – be it in terms of a geographical, historical, and cultural locus or as a space of fantasy and the imaginary – be illuminated by accounting for the ways in which desires are produced, structured, regulated, and mobilized through various institutions and discursive formations? Whether understood as lack or a productive force or a form of affective labor, desire is a concept that intersects with and imbricates a range of complex issues operating on the level of the libidinal as well as the material economy. Nationalism and imperialism, genders and sexualities, aesthetics and consumer culture, and the politics of alterity are but a few, yet are all significant to the study of East Asia.

The Department of Geography and Program in Planning at the University of Toronto is pleased to have Dr. Tania Li as one of its featured guests for this semester's Intersections Speaker Series.

Dr. Li will give a talk titled "To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations" on Oct 23 (Fri), 2-4pm in Sidney Smith Room 2125 (100 St. George).

Please see attached poster for abstract and more information.

From the site:

Founded in 1989, the Henry L. Stimson Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to enhancing international peace and security through a unique combination of rigorous analysis and outreach.

The Stimson Center's work is focused on three priorities that are essential to global security:

* strengthening institutions for international peace and security
* building regional security, and
* reducing weapons of mass destruction and transnational threats

The Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies has just introduced three new courses for the 2009-10 academic year: "Democracy and Identity in Asia" taught by Professor Jacques Bertrand, "Asia and the New Global Economy" taught by Professor Joe Wong, and "Nationalism, Revolution and Reform in Asia: China in Comparative Perspective" taught by Professor Yiching Wu. The three new courses are all 400-level, and will also be available to interested graduate students. For course codes, times, and descriptions, please visit: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/ai/Resources.aspx