Intellectual History Commons^™

Korean Newspapers And The “Irish Problem”: Japanese Censorship In Colonial Korea, 1920-1930, Jaehyun Kim

Student Work

Jaehyun Kim’s thesis, “Korean Newspapers and the ‘Irish Problem’: Japanese Censorship in Colonial Korea, 1920-1930,” touches upon a subject that scholars of colonial Korea have given insufficient attention to. Kim asks why there featured so many colonial Korean run newspaper articles on the Irish Independent movement in the 1920s and 1930s when the Japanese colonial government actively censored Korean newspapers. Indeed, in the wake of the March First Independent Movement, the colonial authorities shifted its harsh military rule to a more conciliatory cultural policy, allowing Koreans to vent their nationalistic sentiments within the confines of state control. However, the level …

The One-And-A-Half Chinas’ Problem: Taiwan And The Origins Of Peaceful Reunification, 1978–1988, Lucas Miner

Student Work

Lucas Miner’s thesis, “The One-and-a-Half Chinas’ Problem, Taiwan and the Origins of Peaceful Reunification, 1978–1988,” deals with attempts by the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang to achieve unification between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan during the early phase of China’s reform era. The thesis seeks to update our interpretation of Cross-Strait relations by exploring the origins of peaceful reunification, tracing its early evolution from 1978 to 1985. Primary sources from both sides of the strait—especially from the rich repository at the Academia Historica in Taipei—allows Miner to construct a nuanced and significant narrative that uniquely incorporates …

Editor's Introduction, Marc R. Loustau Ph.D.

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction by Managing Editor Marc Roscoe Loustau to Towards an Economic Anthropology of Catholicism in the Age of Pope Francis

Introduction:Towards An Economic Anthropology Of Catholicism, In The Age Of Pope Francis, Samuel Weeks, George Bayuga

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to Towards an Economic Anthropology of Catholicism, in the Age of Pope Francis.

Editor's Introduction, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction by Founding Editor, Mathew N. Schmalz to Graduate Symposium II.

Pop Spirituality In The Context Of Nepal, Kalinda Benson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In this research report, Pop Spirituality in the Context of Nepal, I look to add clarity to what it means to be “spiritual” and how that has been applied historically in context of Nepal. This paper focuses on what has led up to our modern day perceptions on spirituality. In the first section of the paper, I briefly describe what I mean when I say, “pop spirituality” or a “modern spirituality.” I define spirituality and how it differs from religion, a religion, and what secularization is. I want to acknowledge that there are many types of spirituality that exist of …

Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration To Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911, Gregory Jany

Student Work

A 2020-2021 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Gregory Jany (Jonathan Edwards, '21) for his essay submitted to the Department of History, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911" (Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History, advisor).

Gregory Jany’s thesis, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911,” is elegantly written, deeply researched in multiple archives—British materials, Dutch archives, and Qing documents—and uses several languages beyond English: Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, Chinese, and Classical Chinese. Grounded in the literatures of the late imperial China, the Chinese diaspora, and colonial Southeast Asia, …

Focus On The Busy Intersections Of Culture And Cultural Change, Laura Elder

Journal of Global Catholicism

The dynamics of religious resurgence reveal the important ways that religious ritual and performance are meaning making spaces which are not self-contained or cut off from the rest of culture, but rather are a key locus of cultural change. A renewed emphasis on the busy intersections of meaning making – as rituals are connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other domains of social life – would improve the utility of the Catholics & Cultures website for understanding global cultural change. And a renewed emphasis on cultural change would also provide a better means for exploring reflexively by seeking to understand both …

A Widened Angle Of View: Teaching Theology And Racial Embodiment, Mara Brecht

Journal of Global Catholicism

Today’s undergraduate students are digital natives, shaped by constant access to information and countless experiences of encountering the world through the convenience of a screen. The ostensible comfort students have with difference gives way to a paradox, and one that’s made especially apparent in the theology classroom: Students are comfortable with seeing difference and particularity at a distance, but not adept at locating difference and particularity “at home.” I contend that Catholics & Cultures can help students from the dominant culture—namely, white students who comprise the vast majority of Catholic college students—destabilize their notion of the Catholic tradition as tightly …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Alternative Marriage Practices Of Wartime Urban China In Discourse And Practice (1937-1949), Charlotte Cotter

Student Work

A 2017-2018 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Charlotte Cotter (Grace Hopper College '18) for her essay submitted to the East Asian Studies Program, "Alternative Marriage Practices of Wartime Urban China in Discourse and Practice (1937-1949)” (Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, advisor).

Charlotte Cotter’s thesis, “Alternative Marriage Practices of Wartime Urban China in Discourse and Practice (1937-1949)” is an excellent study of how women in Shanghai during wartime explored different modes of intimate life, including alternate forms of marriage, when the upheaval of war tore apart families and disrupted personal relations. Throughout …

Editor's Introduction, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to African Catholicism: Contemporary Issues: Volume: 1, Issue 2 of the Journal of Global Catholicism

Enclave Of Ingenuity: The Plan And Promise Of The Beijing Intellectual Property Court, Max Goldberg

Student Work

A 2016-2017 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Max Goldberg (Pierson College '17) for his essay submitted to the Ethics, Politics, & Economics Program, "Enclave of Ingenuity: The Plan and Promise of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court.” (Frances Rosenbluth, Damon Wells Professor of Political Science, and Paul Gewirtz, Potter Stewart Professor of Law, advisors.)

Max Goldberg’s thesis, Enclave of Ingenuity: The Plan and Promise of the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, examines in depth one of the most interesting institutions in today’s China – an experimental court that stands at the intersection of …

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Authority, Representation, And Offense: Dalit Catholics, Foot Washing, And The Study Of Global Catholicism, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

In reflecting on a sharp scholarly exchange at a conference, this article explores issues of authority, representation, and offense in global Catholic and South Asian Studies. Focusing on the act of foot washing by Dalit Catholics, the article examines how scholarly offense is linked to particular claims of representational authority. The article also puts this discussion within the context of contemporary debates about Western portrayals of Indian culture and society.

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Dalit Catholic Home Shrines In A North Indian Village, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines three Catholic home shrines in a Dalit community in North Indian and argues that it is misleading to think that home shrines and other collections of material objects are somehow static conveyors of meaning. “Meaning” can mean many things or nothing at all, depending upon the terms we are using and the scholarly methods we deploy. The crucial aspect of Dalit Catholic home shrines is that they are literally open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to touching and being touched. Their significance—their meaning—depends not on decoding their structure or symbolic logic, but interacting with them as part of …

The Grace Of God And The Travails Of Contemporary Indian Catholicism, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay discusses the challenges faced by Indian Catholicism, particularly as it seeks to adapt to and in contemporary, post-colonial India through the process or program of what is called inculturation, a self-conscious program of adaptation to Indian religion and culture. Since Indian Catholicism is constituted by so many irreducible persons-in-relation, the article focuses on the life of the Catholic priest, Swami Ishwar Prasad in whose life we may chart something of the inculturation movement and the Catholic tradition as it is found in North India region, in one rather long and rich lifetime connecting two centuries. The article seeks …

In Continuity With The Past: Indigenous Environmentalism And Indian Christian Visions Of Flora, James Ponniah

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article considers whether Indian Christianity can be said to have a distinctive ecological vision. The first two parts of the article examine Christian environmentalism in two native forms of Indian Christianity: Tamil Christianity and Tribal Christianity. Continuing with the theme of conformity to the local culture—though of the elite—the third part of the article investigates how Christian Ashrams function as dynamic centers for ecological praxis. The last part of the article considers how contemporary Indian Christian communities can respond to the ecological challenges confronting them.

Antoniyar Kōvil: Hindu-Catholic Identity At The St. Anthony Shrine In St. Mary’S Co-Cathedral, Chennai, Pj Johnston

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article combines ethnographic description of the practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the observation that this material cannot be understood using the standard world religions paradigm that essentializes Christianity as exclusivistic. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine in light of premodern and Vatican II templates for inculturation and the negotiation of religious difference, the article highlights overlap between Tamil Hinduism and the Tamil Popular Catholicism of the site to argue that the beliefs and practices documented should inform descriptive and normative accounts of Catholic Christianity. Because Tamil …

How Liberal Korean And Taiwanese Textbooks Portray Their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”, Frances Chan

Student Work

A 2015-2016 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Frances Chan (Timothy Dwight College '16) for her essay submitted to the Department of History, “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”.” (Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, advisor.)

Frances Chan’s essay “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles,” is a fascinating exploration of the creation of historical memory as seen in textbooks on the history of postwar economic development in Korea and Taiwan. Drawing on her remarkable linguistic skills in both Korean and …

How Modern India Looks At Its Premodernity, Ananya Vajpeyi

Ananya Vajpeyi

No abstract provided.

Pure Land And The Social Order In Twelfth-Century China: An Investigation Of "Longshu’S Treatise On Pure Land", Trevor Davis

Student Work

A 2012-2013 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Trevor Davis (Saybrook College '13) for his essay submitted to the History Department, “Pure Land and the Social Order in Twelfth-Century China: An Investigation of Longshu’s Treatise on Pure Land.” (Valerie Hansen, Professor of History, advisor.)

Davis' essay makes a powerful argument about the Pure Land Buddhist Wang Rixiu's understanding of Southern Song (1127-1279) society. Although Pure Land Buddhism is often thought to be egalitarian - or at least to challenge traditional hierarchies - Trevor shows that for Wang Rixiu, an egalitarian Pure Land coexists …

Diabolical Frivolity Of Neoliberal Fundamentalism, Sefik Tatlic

Sefik Tatlic

Today, we cannot talk just about plain control, but we must talk about the nature of the interaction of the one who is being controlled and the one who controls, an interaction where the one that is “controlled” is asking for more control over himself/herself while expecting to be compensated by a surplus of freedom to satisfy trivial needs and wishes. Such a liberty for the fulfillment of trivial needs is being declared as freedom. But this implies as well the freedom to choose not to be engaged in any kind of socially sensible or politically articulated struggle.