Mission

Lecture Series and Conferences

The Center for Asian Research accomplishes this mission in several ways. The Center encourages ASU faculty research by offering travel grants, funded by an endowment from the late A.T. Steele; as part of an annual lecture series, grant awardees report on their travel experiences and research. The Center also arranges lectures by ASU graduate students, providing them a forum for sharing their research findings with the ASU community. In addition, the Center helps bring guest lecturers to ASU from across the nation and around the world. Past speakers have included Oe Kenzaburo, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, astrophysicist Fang Lizhi of the University of Arizona, Donald Gregg, former ambassador to Korea and current president of the Korea Society in New York, and John W. Dower, Pulitzer-prize winning historian and professor, MIT. These lectures all play an integral role in faculty teaching and research. In recent years, the Center has also brought two national Sinology conferences to campus, and hosted the 2003 Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.

Undergraduate Certificate Program

The Center offers one of the most comprehensive and rigorous undergraduate certificate programs at ASU. Requiring language skills in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Lao, Thai, or Vietnamese, the Asian Studies Certificate program also encourages students to gain area-specific knowledge of Asia by taking courses in anthropology, art, geography, history, humanities, literature, politics, and religion. During the 2002-03 academic year, students could choose from a total of 181 Asian-emphasis course offerings. More than 10 percent of ASU's undergraduate students take at least one such course. Beginning in the fall of 2003, the Center has offered a Graduate Certificate in Asian Studies. The Center and the Program for Southeast Asian Studies each have an Asian Studies advisor to assist certificate students.

Graduate Certificate in Asian Studies

The Graduate Certificate in Asian Studies will provide students with official transcript recognition of specialization in Asian Studies related to their major area of study. The certificate is offered in two tracks: East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam). This certificate is open to any student pursuing an M.A. or Ph.D. degree in any school or division of the university.

Asian Film Series

In conjunction with our Asian Studies courses the Center shows a series of Asian films every fall and spring, featuring both new and classic films; all are shown in the original language (subtitled in English), and each one is introduced by a member of the Center's affiliated faculty. This film series provides access to critically acclaimed Asian films that are otherwise often unavailable to people in the greater Phoenix metropolitan community.

Video Collection

The Center maintains a sizeable Asian video and DVD/VCD collection, including feature films as well as documentaries, open for check-out to all ASU students and faculty. These films are frequently borrowed by ASU faculty members for their courses, as well as by individual students for both academic and personal use.

Library Resources

The Center and the Program for Southeast Asian Studies both provide reading rooms stocked with periodicals such as Far Eastern Economic Review, numerous scholarly journals, and Asia-focused newspapers in English as well as in Asian languages. The Center's Library Committee has been working to increase and improve the already impressive collection of Asian books and materials at Hayden Library, which to date contains over 75,000 volumes in Chinese and Japanese, 55,000 volumes about China and Japan written in English, a Southeast Asian language collection of nearly 20,000 titles, and a growing collection of volumes in Korean. The Center regularly seeks support for library acquisitions through grants and donations.

Assistance with Study-Abroad and Exchange Programs in Asia

The Center's Study Abroad Committee works closely with ASU's International Programs Office to advise and assist with study-abroad and exchange programs. Currently, ASU students have opportunities for studying in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. The Center's affiliated faculty also supervise summer programs in China and Japan, as well as a new winter study program to China and one to India.

Educational Outreach Resources for K-12 Teachers

Beginning in the fall of 2002, the Center was able to hire an outreach coordinator for the first time, thanks to a generous 4-year grant from the Freeman Foundation. Since then, the outreach program has become affiliated with the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia (NCTA) as the Arizona site for organizing annual professional development seminars in Asian Studies for secondary school teachers. The Center's outreach program has also won a grant from the Arizona Humanities Council to offer a professional development seminar in Asian Humanities in the summer of 2003. The outreach program publishes in electronic format the ASU Asian Studies in Arizona (ASU ASIA) Newsletter for educators several times each month. The newsletter alerts teachers to teaching resources, professional development opportunities, and student scholarships. It also provides a forum for intellectual exchange and a community network that connects teachers of Asian Studies from across the state. A goal of the outreach program is to develop a Curriculum Development Resource Library within the Center. The Program for Southeast Asian Studies is also actively participating in outreach activities to K-12 and community organizations including the Arizona Asian American Association, as well as Southeast Asian American communities, city officials, and business communities. The Program offers teacher-training workshops, traveling cases of Southeast Asian exhibits, cultural ambassadors, and professional growth workshops, and regularly sponsors performing arts events, museum exhibits, lectures, an annual TET Vietnamese New Year festival, and other cultural events.

Center Faculty

The Center has 70 affiliated ASU faculty members, all with expertise in Asia as a result of research, teaching, or other professional experiences related to the region, and with appointments in numerous departments and several colleges at ASU. The Center maintains a directory of these affiliates, detailing teaching and research interests as well as publications.

The Center for Asian Research is part of ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.