Faculty
News/New Faculty Members
New Faculty
Martha Chaiklin
The History Department has hired Martha Chaiklin to replace Ann Jannetta, who is retiring at the end of this term. Martha received her PhD from Leiden University in 2003, and Brill published her thesis, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture: The Influence of European Material Culture on Japan, 1700-1850, the same year. Martha is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she majored in Asian Studies, and has MAs from the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan and Seijô University in Tokyo. She has worked as the curator of Asian history at the Milwaukee Public Museum and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Martha is a bibliophile and will come to Pittsburgh with a large collection of Japanese books. Her current research interest is the ivory trade in Asia--which stretched from Africa, the source of the ivory, to Japan. Thus, Martha will provide the ampersand between the department's Atlanticists and Pacificists. Martha can be contacted at <chaiklin@uwm.edu>
Clark Chilson
The Department of Religious Studies is delighted to announce that Dr. Clark Chilson will be joining our faculty in the fall as an assistant professor of Japanese religions. Clark was awarded the PhD in 2004 for “Hidden Buddhists: How and Why Three Shinshu Confraternities in Japan have been Secretive” from Lancaster University, UK, under the direction of Ian Reader, perhaps the foremost western scholar currently working on contemporary Japanese Buddhism, popular religion and ethnography. Clark has lived and studied in Japan for many years (including a BA earned at Nanzan University), has near native fluency in Japanese, and reads modern and classical Japanese, kanbun and classical Chinese. Clark will be offering Religion in Asia and Japanese Religious Traditions in the fall term 2006. We would appreciate your assistance in bringing these courses to the attention of interested students. He has just been awarded a Wabash Grant Workshop on Teaching and Learning for Pre-tenure Religion Faculty at Colleges and Universities. Clark can be contacted at <chilsocv@plu.edu>
Gabriela Lukacs
The Anthropology Department has hired Gabi Lukacs who received her PhD from Duke University in 2005. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores themes of mass media, globalization, and identity in contemporary Japan. Her current research investigates a recent Japanese phenomenon, the Net Idols—young women, who produce their own Web sites that she theorizes as a new form of media entrepreneurship. She is teaching courses on the subjects of media, mass culture theory and methods, political economy, introduction to anthropology, and Japan in the twentieth century. Gabi can be contacted at <lukacs@pitt.edu>
Promotions
Siddharth Chandra has been promoted to associate professor with tenure in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Nicole Constable has been promoted to the rank of full professor in the Department of Anthropology.
Hiroshi Nara, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (2002-) has been promoted to the rank of full professor.
Latest News
Dennis Hart has been named Asian Studies Center director.
Joseph Alter recently received the 2006 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) for his book, Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Science and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2004). Find out more ...
Retirement
Keith Brown, a mainstay of Pitt’s
Asian
Studies
Center
,
has retired as UCIS
Research Professor of Anthropology. Brown
joined the Anthropology faculty in 1966, and while at Pitt he founded the University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University Japanese Science and Technology Management Program, served as Director of the Asian Studies Program for twelve years, chaired the Department of Anthropology, and served on national and international scholarly committees too numerous to mention. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to furthering Japanese Studies and promoting academic exchange between
Japan
and the
United States
, the Japanese government awarded h
im
the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in 1995. His Chancellor’s 2000 Distinguished Teaching Award capped a series of teaching awards bestowed by student committees. His decades-long study of farming communities in Mizusawa, Japan, have brought h
im
numerous external grants and honors, and the many students whose dissertations he has directed have spread his understanding of his field far and wide.
Thomas Rimer, Professor in the Theatre Arts Department and the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department, retired this past Spring 2005. Rimer served as Chair of the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department for several years. He taught Forms of Asian Theatre a course that covered a close reading of
Japan
’s great medieval war epic, The Tale of the Heike, which chronicles the destruction of court culture and the rise of military clans.
Fred W. Clothey (PhD, Chicago) joined the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at Pitt in 1975, was promoted to associate professor in 1978, and has been full professor since 1984. Dr. Clothey served as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies (1978-1988, 1991-1992, 1995-1998), Academic Dean of Semester at Sea (fall 1988), and Acting Director of Asian Studies (1979-1980). He retires in 2006 after thirty years of research, teaching and service.
