FRIDAY. APRIL 15th
ROGER YU, Ph.D.
Roger Yu is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Professor of
Physics at NYIT. He has been instrumental in securing large grants from
such organizations as NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the
National Science Foundation. He has
received numerous honors, including an honorary professorship from the National
Laboratory for Infrared Physics at the Chinese Academy
of Sciences. Under his leadership, NYIT has spent the last few years
revising its core curriculum. The newly developed core curriculum, in its
implementation phase, focuses on the interdisciplinary approach of learning,
and the crossover between arts and sciences has been a signature. At this
conference, Dr. Yu will share some of the experiences of NYIT in integrating
the two disciplines at the global campuses.
LIU HAIPING, Ph.D.
Liu Haiping, Professor of English and American
literature, Nanjing University, was a Harvard-Yenching Scholar at Harvard
in 1983-84, Fulbright Researcher at University
of Pennsylvania and New York University
in 1991-92. He was a resident tutor in Chinese culture at Adams House, Harvard
University in 1998-99, William Quillian International Professor of Chinese
culture at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Virginia in 1999-2000; and John
Heath Visiting Professor at Grinnell College, Iowa in American and Chinese
theater and literature in 2002. He spoke at various academic conferences in Australia, Israel,
Japan, Korea and a
number of universities in the States. He organized and directed academic conferences
and theater festival and brought a traditional Chinese theater group to visit
five mid-west and western states of the US. He currently serves as
President of China Association for the Study of American Literature.
SATURDAY, APRIL 16th
JANE HIRSHFIELD, poet
Jane
Hirshfield is the author of six award-winning collections of poetry, including After
(HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a
“Best Book of 2006” by The Washington
Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and Given Sugar, Given Salt
(finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as a
now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of
Poetry. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting
the work of earlier women poets of many cultures. Hirshfield’s other honors
include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and
Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 40th
Annual Distinguished Achievement
Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, an honor previously received by
Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. Her work has been
featured in five editions of The Best
American Poems and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The
Times Literary Supplement/TLS,
The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Orion, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. Frequently featured on public
radio and television, Hirshfield has presented her poems and taught at
festivals and universities throughout the U.S.
and in China, Japan, the Middle East, the U.K., Poland,
and Ireland. Her seventh poetry book, Come, Thief, will appear in August 2011 from Knopf.
MIKAKO IWATAKE, Ph.D.
Mikako
Iwatake is
Adjunct Professor of Japanese studies in the Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki, Finland. She obtained her Ph.D.
from the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. in 1993. She was Visiting
Associate Professor in anthropology at Waseda
University in Tokyo,
Japan in 1999-2002, and was
Acting Professor at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
in 2006-2009. Moving between languages, countries, continents, and academic communities, she works in the area of
comparative cultural studies of Japan.
Instead of confining Japan
to the role of the research objects, she is interested in obtaining
perspectives attained from Japanese experiences as well as their studies, which
in turn will provide a critical perspective to challenge the current scholarly
knowledge and its hierarchy. She hosted three international conferences and has
extensive teaching experiences in Finland,
Japan, and the United States.
She is currently a board member and researcher of two international projects –
one on gender and Asia and the other on Asian
conceptualization of the social. Among the books edited are The Politics of Folklore Studies
(Miraisha, Tokyo, 1996) and New
Perspectives from Japan and China (University of Helsinki,
2010). She is currently working on two books on cultural politics of Tokyo and on women,
militarism and nation-state in a Finnish context.