Outstanding faculty win 2025 teaching and advising awards
Among those being recognized for exceptional teaching and mentorship this year are faculty members Begüm Adalet, Claudia Verhoeven, and Marcelo Aguiar.
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Our faculty members are a multi-disciplinary group in the humanities who conduct research and teach on topics arranged under our rubrics of "Literature & Linguistics," "Religion," and "Society & Culture," as well as offering instruction in 14 modern Asian languages, and the department also offers instruction in five classical Asian languages (Sanskrit, Pali, Literary Chinese, Literary Japanese and Literary Vietnamese).
The department works with Asian specialists of all disciplines across campus, who collectively comprise the East, South and Southeast Asia area studies programs.
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History of Asian Studies at Cornell
The Department of Asian Studies was initially organized in 1946 as the Department of Far Eastern Studies (changed to Asian Studies in 1962). It developed from a wartime program in the language, history, and culture of China that trained people for government service. The three Cornell Asian area programs for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia subsequently developed within the department before assuming their separate existences in the 1970s. Initially, the Department was located in Franklin Hall (renamed Tjaden Hall in 1980).
As more positions were assigned to the Department, and with the growth of graduate programs that provided universities around the world with prominent scholars of Asia, the problem of space became chronic. In the early 1970s the Department shifted to Rockefeller Hall where it now occupies the third floor.
Asian Studies News
'My research gave me new perspectives on what community-building really means'
McKenna Norton is an Asian studies major & a Robert S. Harrison College Scholar.
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Share and hear poetry in many languages at this April 9 event
The event celebrates April as National Poetry Month.
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Student spotlight: Jingya Guo
Jingya Guo, a doctoral candidate in history, studies how historical actors contested and reconfigured the demarcation between pathology and health for female bodies in China.
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Poets in Japan experiment at the edge of media
During the past century, experimental poets in Japan have been stretching the conventional definition of the genre by creating poems in unexpected places, according to a Cornell researcher.
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Events celebrate Chinese composer who also transformed language
Chao Yuen-Ren 1914, composer of the first Chinese keyboard music, was also a ground-breaking linguist who transformed the Chinese language through his scholarship on Chinese grammar and phonology.
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Global experts look abroad for lessons in super election year 
Voters in more than 60 countries are heading to the polls to elect new leaders in this record-breaking “super election” year. In many of those countries, democracy itself is on the ballot.
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A&S announces membership in MLA Strategic Partnership Network
“We felt this is an important resource that should be available to our humanists at all levels, whether they have the resources to pay for membership or not,” said Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences.
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