Asian Studies Department - Vanderbilt University

01/28/2025

Many Americans associate the end of the Korean War with peace, freedom, and capitalist democracy’s victory over socialism in the southern part of the peninsula. However, in her new book, “Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics,” Assistant Professor of Asian Studies We Jung Yi argues that postcolonial South Korea was fraught with tensions and conflicts, a divided nation where a cohort of citizens perceived as “pro-North” or “unpatriotic” were vilified and dehumanized.

In the aftermath of the Korean War and through the deepening Cold War, an anticommunist, developmental ideology dominated South Korea. Yi focuses on the experience of “wormification”—the identification of some humans as low, repulsive, or dangerous because they didn’t adopt this ideology. She posits that this vilification and dehumanization intensified over the period of high growth under an authoritarian regime and continued into the neoliberal era and even the present.

Yi reclaims the buried memories of these “unpatriotic” or “unproductive” South Korean citizens through an original analysis of literature and media: influential novels of dissent against dictatorial rule, blockbuster films, and webtoons. She argues that the individuals represented in these varied works do not remain submissive; rather, they use their memories to create an alternative society beyond divisive politics.

“We must confront painful, contentious pasts so that we can dismantle the persistence of human hierarchies,” Yi said. “By joining the ‘wormified’ protagonists in literature and media to navigate an ethical way of life, we can, I hope, envision the end of worm-time.”

09/23/2024

The Asian Studies Department at Vanderbilt University invites applications for the position of
tenure-track Assistant Professor of Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies to begin in Fall 2025. The department seeks a social scientist with an innovative scholarly research agenda that employs qualitative, quantitative, or interdisciplinary research methods. The successful candidate will contribute to the continued development of the Asian American & Asian Diaspora Program within the Asian Studies Department. Applications are particularly welcome from scholars whose research engages Asian American & Asian Diaspora Studies within contemporary regional and global contexts of migration, racial justice, gender/sexuality, and/or religion.

Qualifications
Candidates must have completed all requirements for the PhD no later than August 1, 2025, possess a clear research trajectory, and demonstrate a commitment to undergraduate teaching and programming.

Application Instructions
Applications are accepted via Interfolio here [ http://apply.interfolio.com/154998 ]. To be
considered, please submit the following materials: cover letter, curriculum vitae, research
statement, a writing sample (dissertation chapter or article of 25-50 pages), teaching statement
that also includes evidence of teaching effectiveness, including all available course evaluations, two syllabi (from existing or planned courses taught), and three letters of reference. Review of application files will begin on November 4, 2024, and continue until the position is filled.

02/07/2022

Join us for a live, in-person conference this weekend: “China and the World”
Bringing together scholars from around the southeast to present their research related to the history, literature, and culture of China from the Ming to Mao.
For complete schedule, see https://my.vanderbilt.edu/chinaandtheworld/schedule/

11/10/2021

Vanderbilt’s first Maymester in Korea is slated for 2022. Team Korea has made some eye-catching promotional materials.

03/25/2021

VU Asian Studies major Leah Field is among 16 students from Vanderbilt to receive Fulbright awards this year! Congratulations, Leah!

Sixteen students and recent alumni from Vanderbilt University have been awarded Fulbright awards for the 2020-21 academic year. In addition, Vanderbilt is among the U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most Fulbright U.S. students for 2020-21.

03/25/2021

Vanderbilt Asian Studies Department Statement on March 16 Shootings in Georgia

Dear Vanderbilt Community,

We, the members of the Asian Studies Department at Vanderbilt University, strongly condemn the shootings in Atlanta, on March 16, 2021, that claimed the lives of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. We view these killings as anti-Asian hate crimes that intersect with patriarchy and misogyny following a year of heightened xenophobia wrongfully blaming Asians for the COVID-19 pandemic. These killings are the latest in a series of events endemic to the United States’ history of racialization and violence against Asian Americans. Public discourses and cultural representations in the US have routinely dehumanized and sexualized Asian/Asian American women as subservient objects of male desire and violence. The events in Atlanta are a tragic reminder that such discourses and representations can circulate with deadly consequences.

We mourn the loss of lives and grieve with the victims’ families and communities. Each of the murdered victims was denied the right and support to live their lives in safety and peace, to live according to their hopes and loves. We know that this incident has caused fear, frustration, and anger among Asian, Asian American, and APIDA communities, including our own colleagues and students. We will work with our communities, allied individuals, and organizations so that our fears, frustrations, and demands are heard and addressed. We join other organizations and activist groups in the calls of support and protection for Asian, Asian Americans, and APIDA members of Vanderbilt and middle Tennessee—and in the struggles for justice against all forms of racism.

We support the Vanderbilt students who have been organizing for the establishment of an Asian American Studies major and center at Vanderbilt. As a department we are committed to developing a curriculum that centers histories of anti-Asian discrimination and APIDA-led resistance movements in the United States and globally. To study these histories is to understand more accurately the racist foundation of the United States, the core of European imperialism, and Asia since the sixteenth century. Taken together, these pasts and ideologies constitute our present. To this end, the Asian Studies Department has initiated a search for a Mellon Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. While being only a three-year non-tenure track appointment, it will immediately provide more course offerings in Asian American history and culture and serve as the initial steps towards expanding tenure-track faculty appointments in support of an Asian American Studies program.

We will continue this advocacy for resources and program-building for Asian American Studies, while working with students, colleagues, departments and programs toward an anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable curriculum and pedagogy.

03/22/2021

Atlanta Vanderbilt student Angie Liang (‘21) speaking at Protect Asian Lives - Nashville.

03/16/2021

A group of Vanderbilt Asian American undergrads, grads, and alums released a statement and petition today lobbying for the establishment of an Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program at Vanderbilt. Read and sign here:

Bring Asian American Studies to Vanderbilt. Sign the Statement We, the Asian American students, faculty, and alumni at Vanderbilt University, call for the administration to take immediate action in support of the establishment of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies. Every year, more Asian Ame...

03/11/2021

The Asian Studies Department welcomes three new additions for 2020-21, pictured from left to right clockwise: Mabel Gergan, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies; Pengfei Li, Lecturer in Chinese; and Ji You Whang, Lecturer in Korean. Bravely joining us in the midst of the pandemic, their on-boarding and starts at teaching have been non-traditional, to say the least, but they are gradually acclimating themselves to Nashville and Vanderbilt and are enthusiastic about being here. We intend a proper welcoming reception for them toward the end of this challenging academic year.

03/11/2021

Rob Campany's latest monograph, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300BCE - 800CE is out from Harvard University Asia Center this October with an appropriately cool cover for a cool topic. From the press page:

"Dreaming is a near-universal human experience. But there is no consensus on why we dream, or how we should approach dreaming. This book investigates what dreams meant to people in late classical and early medieval China. It maps a common dreamscape—an array of divergent ideas about what dreams are, and how they should be responded to—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, classics, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions.

What was thought to happen when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and animals? By answering these questions, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated dream experiences. Yet it also brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures ancient and contemporary. Ultimately this book investigates how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, and reflects on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming."
Congratulations Rob!

03/11/2021

Tony Stewart, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies, has been awarded the 2021 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize for his 2019 book, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination. The Coomaraswamy Prize "honors a distinguished work of scholarship in South Asian Studies that promises to define or redefine the understanding of whole subject areas" and is the top award for a publication in the field. The award will be presented at the 2021 AAS Virtual Conference on March 24. The entire Asian Studies faculty toasts Tony on this well-earned honor!

02/26/2021

Professor Mabel Gergan is a featured speaker for a webinar sponsored by the Association for Nepal and Himalaya Studies on the challenges of conducting research and scholarship in the Himalaya.