Research Showcase Webinar
(Note: A recording of this panel is now available here.)
September 14, 2022 at 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET
Join the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) for a webinar showcasing the research of former CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellows and CAORC-NEH Research Fellows, who were affiliated with Overseas Research Centers (ORCs) across Asia. The panel will give brief presentations on their research tenures, project methodology, and outcomes, with an emphasis on cross-border and cross-disciplinary research.
The objectives of the session are (1) for alumni to share strategies and experiences with field-bound researchers; (2) to provide an opportunity for fellows to highlight work transecting regional boundaries/national borders and transcending disciplinary boundaries; (3) to share strategies on conducting fieldwork in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This event expands on a recent panel at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, which featured current and former CAORC fellows. This event will be recorded.
Panelists and presentations include:
Diana Kim – From Fellowship to Book: Reflections on the CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellowship
Justin Henry – Ravana’s Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below
William Taylor – Understanding Pastoral Prehistory in Inner Asia’s Mountain Zones Through Glacial Archaeology
Anna Stirr – Performing Aspirations: Love and Revolution in Nepali Progressive Song
More information about the panelists:
Justin Henry received his PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2017 and is currently Lecturer in Religious Studies at Georgia College & State University. He is a historian of South Asia interested primarily in literary exchange between Tamil Hindus and Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka and South India in the pre- and early modern periods. Research for his first book, Ravana’s Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (forthcoming on Oxford University Press USA), was completed with assistance from a CAORC-NEH Senior Research Fellowship in spring 2019. Henry also serves on the Board of Directors of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, a CAORC member Overseas Research Center.
Diana S. Kim is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and BA from Korea University. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant, with regional focus on Southeast and East Asia. Kim is the author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton UP 2020), which won the 2021 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on projects regarding comparative colonial legacies, as well as the transnational politics of caste discrimination and global histories of untouchability. For AY 2021-2022, she is at the Institute for Advanced Study as the Hans Kohn Member in the School of Historical Studies.
Anna Stirr is an Associate Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Anna’s research focuses on South Asia, particularly on Nepal and the Himalayan region. She is currently working on two projects that deal with love, intimacy, and politics in Nepal. The first looks at improvised dohori question-answer songs as culturally intimate, gendered expressions of ideas of nation and heritage, within a cycle of migration and media circulation that spans the globe. The second chronicles the history of Nepal’s politically oppositional “progressive song” from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on ideas of love, development, and communist thought as interrelated ways of imagining a better future. Articles from these projects have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. Anna also maintains an active research interest in the relationship between music, religion, politics and public culture in South Asia and the Himalayas. Anna received a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University.
William Taylor is Curator of Archaeology and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder's Museum of Natural History. He directs the museum's Archaeozoology Lab, and serves as editor for the Journal of Glacial Archaeology. His work explains human-animal relationships in the past through the study of ancient animal remains as well as archaeological research in high-altitude and frozen environments.
CAORC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization established in 1981 with a mission to foster international exchange and promote advanced research and educational engagement for U.S. faculty, educators, independent scholars, and students at ORCs located throughout the world. Twenty-five ORCs are member organizations of CAORC, each operating as a registered, independent non-profit in its respective host country. Ten ORCs are located in Asian nations: in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The ORCs are respected academic liaisons in their host countries, with reputations for sponsoring public intellectual programming (such as lectures, workshops, and symposia), facilitating relationships between American and local scholars, and promoting research in the humanities and social sciences. U.S. and host-country universities and colleges rely on the ORCs to fund and support scholarship overseas—currently, nearly 500 institutions in all 50 U.S. states hold institutional memberships in the ORCs.
To learn more about the CAORC and ORC fellowship programs, click here.