March 2019

EALL Assistant Professor Luke Habberstad has been selected for the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship. Luke will be conducting research and writing in China for his next book, tentatively entitled “Water Control and Political Culture in Early Imperial China.” The book will examine both the role of water control in establishing the early Chinese empires and the representation of hydraulic engineering in early texts. Luke’s research will explore how hydraulic engineering emerged as a field of knowledge after imperial unification, emphasizing in particular the connections between hydraulic engineering, the consequences of environmental manipulation, and shifting notions of imperial space. While in China, he will be in residence at Minzu University in Beijing, collaborating with historical geographers as well as archaeologists who have recently completed comprehensive studies of water control projects from the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods.

Lucy Gubbins (’12), a UO alumna who graduated with a minor in Japanese, was recently featured in the fall edition of Oregon Quarterly, the UO alumni magazine. Gubbins, her EALL faculty mentor Kaori Idemaru, and Peipei Wei (PhD ’16), recently published a paper together in the journal Language and Speech. Gubbins currently works in Philadelphia for an e-commerce website. She credits her post-graduation professional success to her “academic research experience as an undergraduate.” Congratulations to Lucy! For the article, see here.

Shu Yang, EALL PhD 2016 and currently Assistant Professor at Western Michigan University, has won the Young Scholar Award of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), in recognition of her paper “Wrestling with Tradition: Early Chinese Suffragettes and the Modern Remodeling of the Shrew Trope.” The award was announced at the biennial EACS conference, held August 29-September 1, 2018, in Glasgow, Scotland. For more information about the conference and the prize, see here. Congratulations to Shu Yang!

On November 20 and 21, Dr. Nobuaki Minematsu, Professor of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, came to UO to discuss his research on the nature of intelligible speech and sources of unintelligibility in speech. Dr. Minematsu gave two talks, one for students of Japanese and the other for instructors of Japanese. In his talks, Dr. Minematsu discussed the pitch accent system in Japanese from the perspective of speech engineering and introduced the audience to the Online Japanese Accent Dictionary (OJAD), which he developed for learners of Japanese. Workshop attendees included instructors of Japanese from UO, OSU, and Chemeketa Community College. 10 other people, including eight from Oregon, one from Hawaii, and one from Japan, participated virtually in the workshop via the Internet. Online streaming of the event was made possible with help from Jeff Magoto at the Yamada Language Center. Thanks to everybody for a successful workshop!

EALL is excited to announce that Jacqueline Huaman is a recipient of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship (HURF) and University of Oregon Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Award!

Jacqueline is undertaking a thesis project that investigates gendered features in Japanese. Her broad goal is to examine whether the gendered nature of Japanese, in particular the idea of “female language,” reflects a normative language ideology or the reality of language use. Her research analyzes represented gender through idol music and gender in practice through naturally occurring conversation data, while also incorporating interviews with Japanese speakers to show their understanding of gendered language.  She plans to present the work at UO Undergraduate Research Forum and the Northwest Linguistics Conference.

EALL Faculty and Staff greeted new UO students (and gave out tasty Asian snacks) at the College Block event held at the beginning of Fall Term 2017. It was a lot of fun!

Susanna Soojung Lim’s English translation of a South Korean novel, “My Uncle Bruce Lee” by Cheon Myeong-kwan, has been featured on the the Hong Kong-based journal Asia Literary Review in its special Spring 2016 issue celebrating contemporary Korean literature:  http://www.asialiteraryreview.com/. Susanna teaches in the Honors College.