February 5

Sukanya Ray’s collaboration with students

Sukanya Ray of the Psychology Department collaborated with two of her students (doctoral student Michelle Jackson and graduate student Danica Bybell) and published “International Students in the U.S.: Social and Psychological Adjustment” appeared in The Journal of International Students, Spring 2013 Vol. 3 Issue 1.

The study examines the role of self-esteem, hope, optimism, coping, acculturative stress, and social support on international students’ depressive symptoms and sociocultural adjustment. Seventy international students completed a self-report online survey. The most notable finding was that the international students used adaptive and maladaptive coping techniques at similar rates.

Greater use of coping techniques, higher acculturative stress and less social support were associated with more depressive symptoms and more difficulty with sociocultural adjustment. Lower self-esteem, less hope, and less optimism were associated with more depressive symptoms, but not sociocultural difficulty. Clinical implications and future directions are also discussed.

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January 30

Da Zheng’s Silent Traveler now in Chinese

Da Zheng has just published the Chinese language version of his well-received 2010 book on Chiang Yee.  The Chinese language version is titled Xixing huaji: Jiang Yi zhuan 西行畫記: 蔣彝傳 (The Silent Traveler in the West: A Biography of  Chiang Yee) (Beijing, Commercial Press, 2013).

Chiang Yee (1903-1977 ) was a poet, painter, scholar, and an exile who lived most of his adult life in the West, principally in England and the United States. In his many publications and through his drawings, he captured the flavor of Western life as seen through an Asian sensibility.  Zheng’s new book begins with 16 plates, most in color, that serve as a visual introduction to the elegantly written text which follows. Other sketches and photos in black and white illustrate the text. Chiang’s poetry, translated in the English edition of Da’s book, is available here in the original Chinese version. The book’s publisher, the Commercial Press  (商務印書館) is one of China’s most established publishing houses.

Amazon China link.

Da book Chinese

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July 26

Popular Culture in China’s Republican Period: The story of a family genealogy

A Chinese language research article of Ron Suleski was recently published.  Titled “Popular Culture in China’s Republican Period: The story of a family genealogy,”民國時期的平民文化:一本家譜的故事.  It appeared in the Journal of Hangzhou Normal University杭州師範大學學報, Vol. 34, No. 3 (May 2012), 1-7.

The article is based on a hand-written family history I bought at a market in Shandong Province 山東省 in 2009.  It did not have many pages and seemed to have very little concrete information, but a thorough analysis of the work revealed a surprising amount of information about the Tang 唐family.  For example, though most likely in a rural area, the Tang family wanted to acquire social status, so over the centuries a number of the men took secondary wives, whose names were listed in the genealogy. It also illustrates that female children who died while still only one or two years old were not even given names in the family record, but were simply listed as “female” (女).

An abstract of the article is here.

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April 30

Book review on Japanese television

Micky Lee has published a book review entitled “Television as a site, place, and space”.  It has been published in the International Journal of Communication (the pdf file can be downloaded here).  One of the books reviewed is Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan, written by Gabriella Lukacs, an anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh.  Here is an excerpt on how the book fills in a void in media studies on Japanese culture:

Japanese popular media and culture is an understudied area. When it is studied, scholars (comprised of academics and journalists) focus on some quintessential Japanese genres, such as anime, manga, and samurai film, rather than media, such as television and magazines. An illustrative case is the “100 books for understanding contemporary Japan” program sponsored by the Nippon Foundation. The 100 books include those on anime (Napier, 2005), manga (Gravett, 2004; Schodt, 1996), and film (Mes & Sharp, 2004; Schilling, 1999); none of them is on television or magazines. Given the proliferation of Japanese popular media, its influence on youth culture in other Asian countries, and its cult following in Western countries, it is puzzling why scholars do not pay much attention to Japanese television and magazines.

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