SUNY in Asian Studies Development

“Crossing Borders and Confounding Identity” advances our understanding of the diversity of Chinese women's experiences and achievements, from the Han Dynasty to the present. With a particular emphasis on literature and the arts, the chapters offer insights into the work of current Chinese women artists as well as literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of women and women's issues. Taken together, they provide new perspectives on Chinese women, their lived experiences and fictional representations, across a broad spectrum of literature, theater, film, and the visual arts. Accessible to nonspecialists and general readers, this book will also be a valuable resource for faculty who teach Asian studies courses in history and in the humanities, as well as for students in interdisciplinary Asian studies courses.

Questions universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity. Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality espouses the concept of relationality—the idea that people’s activities necessarily emerge through contextual engagement with others—as an alternative to the "publish or perish" ethos in higher education. Building on research by comparative philosophers, Mary K. Chang constructs a concept of Confucian relationality and engages it to question universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity. Using a process-oriented approach that features change, the embodied connectedness of people, and the extensive impact of personal cultivation, Chang situates higher educational institutions as continually constructed by people's actions in ways that cannot be wholly described or quantified—and need not be. Values are powerful in educational contexts because they direct how administrators, faculty, and students focus limited energy. Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality reevaluates what universities normatively value and offers a holistically expansive view that positions faculty as experts and learners whose activity is inseparable from the contexts constructed by the relationships from which they emerge.

This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that offer creative pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies.