Professor of Asian Studies Brian Ruppert, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2017-18, is the new Kazushige Hirasawa Professor of Japanese Studies.

Brian Ruppert explains what the appointment means to him:

I am honored to be named the Kazushige Hirasawa Chair at �ֲ���ý College and to help guide the Program in Asian Studies forward through the next series of steps in its illustrious and dynamic history.

I am especially honored to succeed the late Atsuko Hirai as only the second holder of the Hirasawa Professorship.

The late Kazushige Hirasawa was a true man of the modern era. He was a person who studied here, giving numerous talks to local civic groups, such as the Lewiston Grange and the South Paris Kiwanis Club, and writing articles for��The���ֲ���ý Student. Afterward, he returned to Japan to serve as editor at The��Japan Times, become a trusted news commentator, and earn a strong reputation as a scholar of Japan’s foreign policy in the increasingly globalized world.

Brian Ruppert, the new Kazushige Hirasawa Chair of Japanese Studies, poses with Garrett Anderson ’18 of Raleigh, N.C., a double major in Japanese and East Asian studies. Anderson, who studied in Japan in his junior year, will return to Japan for a fellowship in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program. He’s been awarded one of JET’s most sought-after positions, as a coordinator for international relations, who assists local government offices in international exchange activities. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Thanks in part to the endowment honoring Kazushige Hirasawa and his family, �ֲ���ý has a great tradition in East Asian studies, including Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese cultural studies. The program also supports South Asian studies, all seen within a global perspective. Our program also features excellent programs of Chinese and Japanese language study and of study abroad in East Asia.

About the Hirasawa Professorship

The chair was endowed in 1985 in memory of Kazushige Hirasawa ’36, Litt.D. ’61, by his widow, Asako Hirasawa P’65, L.H.D. ’88, and friends and colleagues in the United States and Japan who wished to honor his memory. The chair seeks to strengthen teaching and learning in Japanese and East Asian studies, and to recognize a faculty member whose teaching and research perpetuate the cross-cultural understanding that was the focus of journalist Kazushige Hirasawa’s life and work.

Asako Hirasawa passed away on March 5, 2018. The Hirasawas’ daughter was the late Yoko Hirasawa Munakata ’65.

About Brian Ruppert

Brian Ruppert, who chairs the Program in Asian Studies, joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in September 2017. He comes to �ֲ���ý from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he chaired the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, in 2016–17, directed the university’s Year in Japan program.

A scholar of Japanese Buddhism and other premodern Japanese religions, Ruppert has conducted research stays in Japan totaling seven years, and he is known particularly for archival research in the Buddhist temples there and for his scholarship, including Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, the co-authored��A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism, and��other publications on pre-modern Japanese religions in both English and Japanese.

At �ֲ���ý, he teaches courses on the cultural history of Japan and Japanese religions as well as Japanese language. He is dedicated to helping students explore Japan and its place within East Asia and encouraging students to study abroad in Japan.

Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs Matt Auer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At �ֲ���ý, we often try to imagine the college 25 or 50 years out. What �ֲ���ý looks like in the future is at least partially revealed each time we hire a new faculty member. Today’s new recruit may teach at �ֲ���ý through 2050 or beyond.

Our ability to peer into the future is especially sharp this year because we recently hired nine tenure-track faculty members who will make an impact on the curriculum and on scholarship across all of our intellectual divisions — that is, in the humanities, natural sciences and mathematics, social sciences, and interdisciplinary programs.

Carolina González Valencia is a great example of a new faculty colleague whose impact will likely be felt early and consequentially. She’s an expert in digital media and drawing. Her interest in areas like representations of migration, identity, and “nationlessness,” and her ability to teach students to inscribe their own understanding of these issues on paper, canvas, and film, will add major new intellectual thrusts to the work of the Department of Art and Visual Culture.

She is also the first Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow at �ֲ���ý. In her first year, she enjoys the advantages of a postdoctoral fellowship before converting, automatically, into a tenure-track assistant professorship in 2017–18.

Patrick Otim is the second of our two new postdoc fellows. A historian, his expertise is in 19th- and 20th-century East Africa, focusing on intellectual history in the pre-colonial era.

We talk about “a college for coming times” in our mission statement, but Carolina’s and Patrick’s backgrounds, experiences, and expertise illustrate that the coming times are already here.

Patrick is joined in the history department by Wes Chaney, who adds breadth and depth to our increasingly strong social, historical, and humanistic perspectives on China. Wes’ work is at the intersection of the environment, society, and the law in China during the Qing Empire (1644–1911) with a special interest in historical China’s border areas.

Network Infrastructure Project Manager Kevin Poland, left, and Desktop Operations Analyst Matthew Thomas install components of �ֲ���ý’ new High Performance Computing Cluster at 65 Campus Ave. New members of the physics faculty have taken the lead in bringing the system to �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Wes has an instant community of fellow intellectual travelers since he comes on board at �ֲ���ý at the same time that Mia Liu and Nathan Faries begin their shared assistant professorship in Asian studies. Mia is a history, art, and visual culture expert, focusing on China. Nathan’s research considers religion, particularly Christianity, in Chinese literature in the contemporary context. Both Mia and Nathan teach Chinese language and culture courses.

The trend of faculty renewal is boldly evident in the natural sciences, too. Andrew Kennedy, an organic chemist whose work has neurobiological and medicinal applications, is fortifying connections between our department of chemistry and our program in neuroscience. Kennedy is already a major force nationally in understanding cognitive dimensions of a rare, genetic disorder called Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.

Andrew Mountcastle, a new assistant professor in biology, is exploring the boundaries between physics and anatomy in living creatures, particularly insects. His students can expect to learn everything about the secrets of insect flight, from biomechanical, locomotive, and physiological perspectives.

The trend of faculty renewal is boldly evident in the natural sciences, too.

Two new assistant professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are helping to boost �ֲ���ý to a new level of computing capability. Jeff Oishi is a computational astrophysicist whose specialty is fluid dynamics and whose laboratory is the cosmos, as he studies solar magnetism. His new colleague, Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, uses supercomputers to understand the structure and behavior of supermassive black holes.

With Oishi taking the lead, �ֲ���ý is now installing its first High Performance Computing system — a scalable computer cluster that, for example, will allow the astrophysicists to crunch data-rich imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. This increase in the size and sophistication of the college’s supercomputing resources will continue in dramatic fashion as the college makes hires in the new Digital and Computational Studies program this year, and next.

John Strong, Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at �ֲ���ý and 2015 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

With the Shroud of Turin perhaps the most widely known example, religious relics are a familiar aspect of Christian worship. But relics play important roles in many faiths, and understanding those roles can afford insight into how a faith is regarded by both adherents and observers.

Buddhism is such a religion. And a �ֲ���ý professor of religious studies has received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to support research into ways in which Westerners, Buddhist and otherwise, have responded to relics — objects venerated as physical remains of the Buddha and of enlightened Buddhist teachers.

John Strong, Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies and chair of the Asian studies program at �ֲ���ý, is one of the 175 scholars, artists, and scientists to receive John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships in 2015. (Two joint fellowships were awarded, making the total number of grants 173.) There were more than 3,100 Guggenheim applicants.

“Guggenheim Fellowships are reserved for scholars with exceptional creative ability,” says Matt Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý. “John Strong checks that box with a bold penstroke.”

Strong, Auer says, “has long been an intellectual leader in the field of Buddhist studies, and the project that he’ll undertake is a logical sequel to his pathbreaking 2004 book, Relics of the Buddha, which considers Buddhist attitudes towards Buddhism’s own relics. The timing for the new project is perfect considering a surge of Western interest in Asian religions generally, and Buddhism specifically.”

Relics are omnipresent throughout the Buddhist world.

For Strong, the fellowship will support research and travel during the sabbatical year, starting in August, that he will dedicate to a book tentatively titled Buddhist Relics in Western Eyes.

“Buddhist relics are omnipresent throughout the Buddhist world,” Strong says. “They’re just everywhere. There are some very famous relics, but there are also lots of generic, run-of-the-mill relics.”

In Buddhism, relics are substitutes or surrogates for an enlightened teacher who is absent or departed, “whereas in Christianity, a relic is kind of a conduit to the living saint, or to Christ himself, in Heaven.”

The relics can include objects that a teacher is said to have used, or body parts such as bone fragments and teeth. Distinct to Buddhism are so-called ringsel, a Tibetan word referring to objects that resemble pearls, beads, or crystals, and are said to be found in the remains of an enlightened teacher or master after cremation.

As Strong explains, “Relics almost always have elaborate pedigrees associated with them. There are lineages that are legendary accounts of their transmission through the years. In Western China, there’s a famous finger bone relic of the Buddha.

“There’s a tooth relic pagoda in Beijing, so even the communist government is keeping these relics as part of their association with Buddhist countries in South Asia.”

Strong’s book project will trace the history of Western encounters with Buddhist relics through a series of episodes — beginning with the capture by Portuguese explorers of a tooth relic of the Buddha in India, and the Europeans’ public destruction of the relic as undesirable evidence of heathen religion.

The work will culminate with an exploration of the Maitreya Loving Kindness Tour.

Another section will look at 19th-century religious philosophers who understood Buddhism as a rational non-theistic religion. There was no place for relics in their view of Buddhism, and so they considered veneration of relics to be superstitious and ancillary to “real” Buddhist practice that, Strong says, “was all about meditation and mind development and achieving enlightenment.”

The work will culminate with an exploration of the Maitreya Loving Kindness Tour, an ongoing international touring show of relics of the Buddha and other Buddhist masters from India, Tibet, and China.

The Maitreya exhibition traces “a whole lineage of Tibetan teachers, starting with the Buddha and going through the centuries almost up to the present,” explains Strong, “including some famous teachers like Milarepa, who is said to have declared at the end of his life that he would leave no relics at all, yet here they are.”

Strong will do research at the Maitreya headquarters and archives in London, and attend some of the tour’s exhibitions in Europe. “I’m interested in trying to gauge people’s reactions to this display,” he says.

Strong’s research to date suggests the emergence of an unexpected kind of interest in Buddhist relics: In addition to practicing Buddhists who have a traditional understanding of relics, there appears to be an increasing number of Westerners who ascribe major life changes — such as a cure for chronic illness — to an experience with Buddhist relics.

“That all seems like something new in Western accounts of Buddhist relics,” he says.

In addition to Relics of the Buddha, Strong’s books include The Legend of King Aśoka (Princeton, 1983); The Legend and Cult of Upagupta (Princeton, 1992); The Experience of Buddhism (Wadsworth, 1995); The Buddha: A Short Biography (Oneworld Publications, 2001); and Buddhisms: An Introduction, slated for publication by Oneworld in August.

Strong came to �ֲ���ý in 1978. He holds degrees from Oberlin College, Hartford Seminary Foundation, and the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in the history of religions. A specialist in Buddhist studies, he focuses on Buddhist legendary and cultic traditions in India and South Asia.

Atsuko Hirai, the college’s Kazushige Hirasawa Professor Emerita of History, died July 14, 2014. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Atsuko Hirai, a witty and exacting teacher and scholar who broadened the college’s curricular offerings in history and Asian studies, died July 14 at her home in Lewiston. She was 78.

An eminent historian of modern Japan, Hirai was the Kazushige Hirasawa Professor of History at �ֲ���ý College from 1988 until her retirement in 2013. Born in Japan in 1936, she studied international relations at Tokyo University and earned a doctorate in government from Harvard University.

At the time of her appointment to one of the first endowed chairs at �ֲ���ý, Hirai was an associate of research at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard, where she lectured on the history and politics of her native land.

The Hirasawa Professorship was established at �ֲ���ý by the family and friends of Kazushige Hirasawa, a member of the �ֲ���ý Class of 1936 and a journalist, news broadcaster and editor of The Japan Times. The professorship was designed to reflect Hirasawa’s lifelong commitment to promoting greater understanding between Japan and the U.S. Professor Hirai had an enduring friendship with Hirasawa’s widow, Asako Hirasawa of Tokyo.

Before coming to �ֲ���ý, Professor Hirai also taught at Sophia University, Michigan State University, Wellesley College and Simmons College. She was a fellow in Japanese and Korean studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

At �ֲ���ý, Hirai’s highly popular courses brought depth and breadth to the study of Japan and were consistently oversubscribed throughout her career.

She taught introductory and advanced courses in Japanese history as well as specialized courses on Japan in the age of imperialism, World War II in the Pacific, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, postwar Japan through film and literature, gender in Japanese history, pacifism in 20th-century Japan, food in Japan, and Americans in Japan.

She was a witty and exacting teacher. In nominating her for a teaching award, one student wrote that Professor Hirai conveyed to students “the unique nature of Japanese history and how dramatically and profoundly it has shaped modern Japan and influenced its remarkable postwar growth.”

�ֲ���ý Trustee Darrell Crate ’89 said that she “demanded critical thinking and elevated my ability to learn. At the same time, she displayed a tremendous tolerance and understanding. Those qualities helped me get the most out of �ֲ���ý.”

Professor Hirai’s research focused on the comparative and intellectual history of modern Japan and the West, the state and pre-war liberalism in Japan, and women in modern Japan. She authored the book Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai Eijirō (Harvard University Asia Center, 1987) as well as scholarly articles topics from the influence of the English idealist Thomas Hill Green on Meiji Japan and on Mao Zedong, to family law in the Meiji period, to the early history of the piano in Japan.

Her latest book, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1612–1912, a study of governmental edicts on mourning and related rites in Japan, was published shortly before her death by the Harvard University Asia Center.

Her research was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Northeast Asian Council, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Professor Hirai was an accomplished musician and classically trained soprano. She gave several concerts at �ֲ���ý featuring arias by Mozart and Lieder by composers from Schubert to Richard Strauss, often accompanied by �ֲ���ý artist-in-residence Frank Glazer.

“Atsuko was a devoted musical pilgrim,” said James Parakilas, the college’s James L. Moody Jr. Family Professor of Performing Arts, “seeking out concerts by great singers and sites associated with great composers. It was important to the feeding of her soul.”

She was also a gourmet cook who hosted elegant, intellectually lively dinner parties at her Lewiston home.

When diagnosed with cancer in 2007, she was fearless and hopeful, and remained so throughout her long illness. “I plan to live,” she stated simply. And that she did, with great courage.

Professor Hirai’s survivors include a sister, Hideko Misawa of Tokyo, nephews Yutaka Misawa of Tokyo and Tooru Hirai of Otsuki-shi, Yamanashi, a niece, Eri Hirai of Otsuki-shi, Yamanashi, and many friends in the U.S. and Japan.

�ֲ���ý will hold a memorial service for Professor Hirai at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 25, in Olin Arts Center, followed by a reception in the Museum of Art. In lieu of flowers, those wishing to commemorate her life may make a contribution to The Professor Atsuko Hirai Scholarship Fund, �ֲ���ý College, Lewiston ME 04240.

David George, lecturer in Spanish.

Research by David George, lecturer in Spanish, figured prominently in about a seminar in Spain dedicated to novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Not widely known in the U.S. nowadays, Blasco Ibáñez was famous internationally in the 1920s, and Hollywood adapted several of his novels. Held July 3-5, the conference at the Universidad Internacional��Menéndez Pelayo, in Valencia, looked specifically at the author’s influence on cinema.

George looked at the author’s influence on Japanese film, not American. He discussed his rediscovery of two 1924 films adapted from the fiction of Blasco Ibáñez:��Osumi to haha��(“Osumi and her mother”), based on the story “The Old Woman of the Cinema,” and��Wakasa yo saraba��(“Farewell, youth!”), from the novel��Woman Triumphant.

“At the summit of his international fame, Blasco Ibáñez was received as a real celebrity” in Japan during a 1923-24 visit, writes George. That buzz helped inspire a rash of translations of his work and, later in 1924, the film productions.

During his short visit, Blasco Ibáñez was surprised to find his picture alongside that of the movie star Rudolph Valentino by the door of a Kyoto cinema showing��Blood and Sand, one of the Hollywood adaptations of his work.

George’s presentation concluded that if Blasco didn’t influence the development of Japanese cinema directly, his works did influence a reform of Japanese cinematic language that gave way to directors such as Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa.

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George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who served as President Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace until last spring, delivers the keynote address during a weeklong celebration of international and interdisciplinary education at �ֲ���ý in October.

Mitchell speaks at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, in the �ֲ���ý College Chapel, 275 College St. His talk follows the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls, recently renovated by the college into academic facilities that are advancing the �ֲ���ý education still further across national and interdisciplinary boundaries.

Visit the Open to the World website.
More about the Hedge and Roger Williams renovations.
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During the 4:15 p.m. dedication, Paul Marks ’83, chairman and CEO of the aerospace materials maker Argosy International Inc., offers remarks about living as a global citizen. Mitchell’s talk and the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls culminate Open to the World: �ֲ���ý Celebrates Unbounded Learning, the Oct. 24-28 series of events.

The week’s speakers also include Gary Hirshberg P’13, “CE-Yo” of yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm. The full Open to the World schedule will be announced later in October. For more information, please contact 207-786-6336 or arichard@bates.edu.

Here are events that have been confirmed to date:

Monday, Oct. 24: �ֲ���ý observes United Nations Day.

Tuesday, Oct. 25: opens with a 4 p.m. welcome, readings by international poets at 4:45 accompanied by English translations, and an evening reception at 6, all in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

This five-day event includes poets from around the world presenting their work, accompanied by translations created by �ֲ���ý faculty and students; and a conference on the art and practice of translation. For more information, please contact gdumais@bates.edu or 207-786-8293.

Wednesday, Oct. 26: At 6 p.m. is a screening of Food, Inc., the Academy Award-nominated documentary exposing the corporate-controlled, industrialized underside of American food production. Following the screening at 7:30 p.m., Hirshberg, a prominent figure in Robert Kenner’s 2008 film, offers remarks. Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Thursday, Oct. 27: Hedge and Roger Williams halls are rededicated at 4:30, followed by Mitchell’s keynote. The keynote will be simulcast in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). A reception in the atrium follows Mitchell’s speech.

Friday, Oct. 28: In “Global Possibilities,” five young �ֲ���ý alums discuss their experiences with initiatives that have both local and global consequences; at 4 p.m. in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall.

In a �ֲ���ý College visit, award-winning poet, scholar and novelist Meena Alexander reads from her work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 3, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the English department and the Learning Associates Program, which enables faculty in the humanities and social sciences to bring outside scholars and experts to campus, the event is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8294.

Alexander previously visited �ֲ���ý in 2005. During this week’s visit, she will meet informally with students in courses on lyric poetry and on Asian American women writers, filmmakers and critics. Bringing her to campus is English professor Lavina Dhingra, who has published scholarly essays about, and an interview with, Alexander.

In her latest book, Poetics of Dislocation (2009), part of the award-winning Poets on Poetry series from the University of Michigan Press, Alexander looks at the creative process in herself and other writers. She discusses what it means to come to America as an adult to write poetry, and her place (and the places of others) in the collection of cultures in this country.

Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and grew up in India and Sudan. She moved to England to study at age 18, and now lives in New York, where she is University Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Along the way, she studied and did research at universities ranging from the University of Khartoum to the Sorbonne, from Brown to Columbia, from Kerala University to the National University of Singapore. Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer’s subjectivity, and with the sometimes-violent events that compel people to cross borders.

She has published six volumes of poetry, including Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award; Raw Silk (2004); and Quickly Changing River (2008; all published by Northwestern University Press). Her memoir “Fault Lines” (Feminist Press, 2003) was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books. Her prose also includes two novels, Nampally Road (Mercury House, 1991) and Manhattan Music (Mercury House, 1997).

Alexander has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the Arts Council of England, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She received the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature from the South Asian Literary Association, an organization allied to the Modern Language Association, for her contributions to American literature.

How a tradition of learning inside, outside, and around the classroom influences �ֲ���ý facilities growth

By President Elaine Tuttle Hansen

The unstaged photograph below shows history professor Hilmar Jensen and his honors thesis advisees, Ariela Silberstein ’10 and Anthony Phillips ’10, enjoying late-night ice cream in their Pettengill Hall history lounge amidst the implements of their academic trade — computers, texts, a cell phone, Diet Coke, and some Chex Mix.

Through the photo, we feel the energetic blend of old tools and new approaches. We appreciate the complex process that fuels the scholar’s mind and body, and the way that academic work connects to external sources and destinations across space and time.

The sight of �ֲ���ý learners and teachers in dialogue is familiar to us, yet it captures an intentional educational ideal — one that privileges a rich mix of study and interaction — 155 years in the making here at �ֲ���ý.

While reputed to be utterly demanding, �ֲ���ý’ earliest professors welcomed students to their homes (sometimes by necessity, for those who didn’t have campus offices) with a style that George Millet Chase, son of President Chase, once described as relentlessly “simple and informal.”

As they guided each new generation of students, the earliest faculty also seemed to embrace the concept of a changing world. It was said of philosopher, theologian, and botanist Benjamin Francis Hayes that his “doctrine never petrified.”

Quaint as such language sounds today, that approach — meet students where they are, then carefully push them further than they imagined possible — is still alive and formative.

Take the renovation and expansion of Hedge and Roger Williams halls, for example. By fall 2011, each will offer thoughtful juxtapositions and intersections of classrooms, lounges, offices, and common spaces where students and faculty will meet formally and informally. Inside, outside, and around the classroom, they will learn with and from each other.

Moreover, the denizens of our newest academic buildings reflect our long resistance to fragmentation and factionalization.

Hedge will house the religious studies and philosophy departments as well as the environmental studies program — and we’re not yet tired of joking about a building that embraces “heaven and earth” on just three floors. In doing so, Hedge brings together the Western academy’s oldest disciplines with one of the newest, future-oriented, and global “interdisciplines,” an arrangement that embodies an important theme of liberal arts colleges in the 21st century.

Whereas the earliest colleges and universities trained clerics in religion and philosophy in order to save our eternal souls, today these institutions promote research and problem-solving — by humanists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists — who work across traditional boundaries to improve life on this endangered planet.

Meanwhile, the Bill welcomes our non-English-language study programs as well as the technology-rich Language Resource Center and the Off-Campus Study Office. Among our peers, only �ֲ���ý has gathered under one roof the programs that teach and practice the cross-cultural competence that our students and our world need today.

The faculty and students working within the Bill will, in effect, extend the reach of �ֲ���ý as they learn to transcend some of the boundaries that divide and endanger us. They will look outward through multiple cultural lenses and use, quite literally, different words to describe, understand, and design solutions for the world’s common problems.

Like the initiatives outlined in our academic plan, our facilities improvements will continue to encourage learners and teachers to cross paths, challenge boundaries, and connect and collaborate.

And this brings us back to the deceptively casual scene of a professor and his students, 155 years in the making.

A �ֲ���ý professor has received a $40,000 grant to complete his research into a Vietnamese monk whose self-immolation in 1963 was one of the defining acts of the Vietnam War years.

On June 11, 1963, at a busy intersection in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire to protest the government’s discrimination against the nation’s Buddhist majority.

Captured in an Associated Press photograph that was distributed worldwide, this horrific act launched a series of events resulting in the fall of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation also came to symbolize America’s unpopular involvement in Vietnam, and Malcolm Browne’s photo became an icon of the era.

Trian Nguyen, associate professor of art and visual culture and Luce Junior Professor of Asian Studies at �ֲ���ý, has received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for field research intended to address what he perceives as the scholarly neglect in recent decades of this figure, who remains highly revered among Vietnamese Buddhists. Nguyen was one of 57 to receive the ACLS grant out of a pool of 1,136 applicants.

“Many questions related to this Vietnamese senior monk and his final act are still unanswered,” says Nguyen, assistant professor of art and visual culture and the Luce Junior Professor of Asian Studies.

In his project, Nguyen will study Thich Quang Duc’s personal items and letters, books, legal records and other documents kept at Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and some two dozen interviews with people involved in events around the monk’s self-sacrifice.

Culminating in the first full-length book about Thich Quang Duc in English, the research will bring to light significant new facts about the monk and his significance within the cultural context of the time. Nguyen hopes that the project will also reawaken awareness, within and outside Vietnam, of both the historic importance of the monk’s self-sacrifice and the existence of the research materials.

The completed work, Nguyen writes in his ACLS proposal, “will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of both this famous monk and Vietnamese Buddhist culture and history in the mid-20th century.”

The ACLS advances studies in all fields of the humanities and the social sciences, and aims to maintain and strengthen relations among national societies devoted to such studies.

Nguyen came to �ֲ���ý in 2000 under the auspices of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and is the first faculty member to teach Asian art history at �ֲ���ý. He holds a doctorate in Asian art history from the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained his master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Nguyen’s primary research situates Buddhist art and architecture within the religious, political and social conditions of Southeast Asian culture. He has a particular interest in Vietnam. His teaching covers a wide range of topics in Asian art history, including the art of Zen Buddhism and Buddhist architecture, storytelling in Asian art and monuments of Southeast Asia.