Faculty and Staff
Asian Studies
- Phone: (507) 222-5437
- Fax: (507) 222-7538
Faculty
Director of Asian Studies
Wesleyan, B.A.; University of Wisconsin (Madison), M.A., Ph.D.; the religions of South Asia, Indian Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan ritual and meditative practices, Asian religious poetry, mysticism. Co-author, The Wheel of Time: Kalachakra in Context (1985); author, Is Enlightenment Possible? (1993), Tantric Treasures (2004); co-editor, Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (1996), Buddhist Theology (2000), editor, The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems (2009).
Emeriti Faculty
Princeton, B.A.; University of Chicago, M.A., Ph.D.; South and Central Asian social anthropology, Sherpas and social change, life histories, Nepali pronouns of power and solidarity. Editor, Himalayan Anthropology: the Indo-Tibetan Interface (1978); author, Trans-Himalayan Traders (1986), Sherpas (1990), Living Martyrs (1997).
Staff
Administrative Assistant in Philosophy
Sandy Saari joined the Departments of Religion and Philosophy in late July of 2009 as their Administrative Assistant. Sandy provides administrative support and office management for the two department Chairs and the faculty, along with assisting and supervising student workers. She worked for nine years in the Admissions Office at Carleton managing the Alumni Admissions Representatives (AAR) Program. Before joining the Carleton staff, she served as a RN in the Northfield Public Schools and at Methodist and St. Mary's Hospitals in Rochester, MN.
Other Faculty Involved in the Department/Program
Kristin Bloomer (Wesleyan University, B.A; University of Montana, M.F.A; Cambridge University, B.A, M.A; University of Chicago, Ph.D) teaches courses in global Christianities and religions of South Asia, with specializations in spirit possession and women's and gender studies. Her research pertains to Christianity, Hinduism, and spirit possession in postcolonial south India; her more general interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of subjectivity, with particular attention to religiosity, gender, and embodiment. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Possessed by Mary: Hinduism, Catholicism and Spirit Possession in Contemporary Tamil Nadu, South India," and ethnography of Marian spirit possession in India's most southeastern state. Theoretically, her work addresses questions of religion and postcoloniality, ritual and performativity, feminist approaches to ethnography, and relationships between religion, gender, and the body. Her methods aims to explore and interrogate ideas of agency and of subjectivity that pertain not only to the postcolonial "Other," but also to the anthropologist-scholar.
Bloomer's academic publications include: "Hermeneutics," in Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. eds. Richard Warms and John McGee (SAGE Publications Inc., forthcoming); "Comparative Theology, Comparative Religions, and Hindu-Christian Studies: Ethnography as Method," in The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2008; "Notes From the Field: Retrieving the Dead," The Martin Marty Center for Religion and Culture Web Forum, University of Chicago, February 2005, "http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/022005/index.shtml"; and several book reviews.
Before entering academia, she worked for several years as a print journalist and earned an M.F.A. in non-fiction writing.
PhD, University of Southern California. Founder of anothersubcontinent.com, an online journal and forum on south asian culture.
Liz Coville studied at Cornell University as an undergraduate and received her masters and PhD from the University of Chicago. Her main interests are in linguistic anthropology, the study of ritual, ethnographic writing, and Indonesia. Her research is on the Toraja, a minority group in the highlands of Sulawesi (Indonesia), where she studies the relationship between language, ritual, and social and cultural change.
Visiting Professor of Anthropology (University of Chicago, PhD), has conducted research among Sikhs in the USA, Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and India. His recent work has focused on Sikh diaspora philanthropy. He teaches courses on anthropological theory, anthropology and globalization, global diasporas, and the anthropology of religion and politics.
Professor of Linguistics
Michael Flynn received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts in 1981. Before arriving at Carleton, he taught at a number of American colleges and universities, and Nankai University in Tianjin, The People’s Republic of China, and held a Fulbright Fellowship to the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. He founded Carleton's Program in Linguistics in 1986. He teaches courses in phonetics and phonology, the structure of Japanese, the evolution of speech, neurolinguistics, the application of linguistic theory to literary study, as well as the introductory survey course. His current research interests focus on articulatory and acoustic phonetics, and Japanese.
Professor Flynn is leading an off campus seminar in Kyoto, Japan from late March to early June, 2012 and more detailed information can be found here. Also, visit the blog about this exciting seminar.
Professor Flynn has been a Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Waseda University and Keio University (both in Tokyo), as well as a visiting professor in the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University, Kyoto. He is currently a member of the Faculty Personnel Committee at Carleton. He recently stepped down as Carleton’s Faculty Athletics Director. His writings on Division III athletics can be found here.
Homepage: http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/ling/people/faculty/michealflynnhomepage/
University of Michigan, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.; modern Chinese politics, Sino-Soviet and Sino-Japanese relations, Japanese businessmen in China. Author, "Resolving Commercial Disputes in China: Foreign Firms and the Role of Contract Law" in Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business, vol. 14, #1 (1993).
Director of East Asian Studies
McGill University B.A.; University of California, Berkeley M.A. Ph.D.; Chinese language and linguistics, especially language contact, lexical borrowing; writing systems; Southeast Asian historical linguistics.
Kobe Kaisei Women's College, B.A.; University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), M.A., Ph.D.; Japanese language and language pedagogy, especially proficiency measures. Author, "Dictation as a Measure of Japanese Proficiency" in Language Testing, vol. 8, #2 (1991).
University of Punjab, B.A.; McGill University, B.A.; University of Wisconsin (Madison), M.A., Ph.D.; Islam in Central Asian history. Author, "Muslim Printers in Tsarist Central Asia" in Central Asian Survey (1992); "Printing, Publishing, and Reform in Tsarist Central Asia" in International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (1994); The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Tsarist Central Asia (1998).
Director of American Studies
Simon's Rock of Bard, B.A.; University of Minnesota, M.A.; University of Illinois, Ph.D.; world music, traditional and popular music of India and Indonesia.
University of Virginia, B.A.; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, M.A., Ph.D.; Chinese painting and calligraphy, Chinese gardens, relationship of the military to the arts of China. Author,"Nature Contained: Penjing and Flower Arrangements as Surrogate Gardens in Ming China" in Orientations (2002), "Regulating the Qi and the Xin: Xu Wei and His Military Patrons" in Archives of Asian Art (2003-2004), and "Fleshly Desires and Bodily Deprivations: The Somatic Dimensions of Xu Wei's Flower Painting" in Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (forthcoming 2004).
Wittenberg University, BA; University of Illinois, MA; Princeton University, PhD; teaches courses in the religions of East Asia. Her special interests include Buddhist rituals, religion and society in Japan, food and religion, and Buddhist activism in contemporary societies. Her dissertation examines Buddhist debates in premodern Japan and analyzes how such ritual performance offered a unique site for producing political power and doctrinal knowledge.
Director of South Asian Studies
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison; specializes in social movements, gender and South Asia. Her research, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, focuses on the mobilization and participation of women in a religious right wing movement in India. Originally from India, she emphasizes a transnational feminist perspective in her teachings and travels regularly to India for research and familial purposes. She teaches courses on South Asia, social movements, qualitative methods, post-colonial feminist theory, feminist approaches to research and women's health in the U.S.
Chair of Asian Languages & Literature
Stanford, B.A.; Ochanomizu University, M.A.; Harvard, Ph.D.; Japanese language and literature, especially modern fiction, with particular emphasis on Natsume Soseki, Mishima Yuko, Shimao Toshio, and fiction by contemporary Japanese women. Translator, The Sting of Death and Other Stories by Shimao Toshio (1985); co-author, Women in Japanese Society: An Annotated Bibliography (1992).
Sophia University, B.A.; Tsukuba University, M.Ed.; Monash University, M.A.; University of Chicago, Ph.D. Japanese language, literature, cinema, and intellectual history with particular emphasis on autobiographies, diaries, the literature of ethnic minorities, and documentaries.
Director of Archaeology
Stanford, B.A.; University of Minnesota, M.A., Ph.D.; prehistoric archaeology of South Asia.
Seoul National University, B.A.; Harvard University, A.M., Ph.D.; Modern China and East Asian history, bureaucratic behavior, political ideas, social history, and foreign relations of China, Japan, and Korea. Author, "The Green Gang Nexus in Shanghai General Labor Union, 1924-192," in Papers of Chinese History, vol. 2 (1993); "Literati-Journalists of the Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao) in Discord, 1896-1898," in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, (2002).
Office Hours: Monday 2:00-3:00, Tuesday, Thursday 3:00-4:00; and by appointment
University of Electronic Science and Technology (Peoples Republic of China); Beijing Foreign Studies University, MA, PhD; University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), PhD; modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film; women's literature; comparative literature; comparative study of literature, philosophy, religion and art--the reflection of Taoism and Zen Buddhism in literature and the arts, especially in contemporary Chinese poetry, fiction and film.
Tianjin Normal University, B.A.; Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), M.A.; University of Massachusetts (Amherst), M.A., Ph.D.; Chinese language and literature, especially comparative study of Chinese, English, and American fiction. Translator and editor, Selected Works of Joseph Conrad (in Chinese, 1985); translator, The Shadow Line (in Chinese, 1997). Author, Strangers in Strange Lands (in Chinese, 1991); A Study of Dragons, East and West (in English, 1992); Hearing Rain from a Passing Boat (in Chinese, 2000), Many Roads, Heart's Journey (in Chinese, 2005).
Sit Investment Visiting Professor of Asian Policy Brooklyn, B.A.; Columbia, M.I.A.
