CAS Newsletter

A momentous beginning marked the conclusion of the 2021-22 academic year. The university celebrated the groundbreaking for a transformative Cultural District that will include the Crow Museum of Asian Art and a Performance Hall. (The word “Hallelujah” comes to mind.) This event had special and immense significance for the Center for Asian Studies, since the futures of CAS and the Crow are inextricably interwoven: Think of the opportunities for learning that will emerge from the convergence of Asia-related artistic and cultural presentation with education programming and academic research.

This is a moment to savor – and (pardon the wordplay) on which to build. This year CAS showed the power of collaboration by partnering with the Crow, Dr. Robert Stern and the Department of Geoscience, and Dr. Robert Lavinsky to create an exhibition that invites viewers to regard objects concurrently from scientific, philosophic and esthetic perspectives. That exhibit has profound implications. The biologist Lewis Thomas has suggested that what artists and scientists have in common is the ability to connections – among objects, events, processes and more – where others see difference and separation. If we can lure people to see deeper connections among objects, we can also champion the ability to see and nurture meaningful connections among peoples and cultures.

Please join me in expressing admiration and appreciation to the outstanding team who are primarily responsible for the successes of the past year and my confidence moving forward:

· Dr. Sharon Gou, Associate Director

· Dr. Ming Dong Gu, Associate Director

· Dr. Karl Ho, Associate Director

· Ms. Olivia Kang, Administrative Assistant

ADMINISTRATIVE COMMITTEE:

· Associate Directors Gou, Gu and Ho

· Amy Lewis Hofland, Director of the Crow Museum of Asian Art

· Dr. Ted Harpham, Dean (ret.) of the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College

· Dr. Jennifer Holmes, Dean of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Science

· Dr. Michael Thomas, Director of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History

Adding more depth – specifically in Asian and Asian-American Studies – to our university’s reservoir of excellence is our essential aspiration. Have a summer filled with intellectual and artistic discovery!

Dennis M. Kratz

The CAS was also honored with the Silver Sponsor Award from the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce of Dallas at the Chinese Heritage Celebration on April 16. CAS Associate Director, Dr. Sharon Gou, also held a booth at the event with the UTD Police Department.

Throughout the academic year, CAS Faculty Board Member, Dr. Mike Peng, has made many publications:

BOOK

Peng, Mike W. (2022). Global Strategy, 5th edition. Boston: Cengage Learning (460 pages).

JOURNAL ARTICLES IN 2021-2022

Aguinis, Herman, David B. Audretsch, Caroline Flammer, Klaus E. Meyer, Mike W. Peng, and David J. Teece (2022). Bringing the manager back into management scholarship. Journal of Management (forthcoming).

Wang, Joyce C., Jingtao Yi, Xiuping Zhang, and Mike W. Peng (2022). Pyramidal ownership and SOE innovation. Journal of Management Studies (forthcoming).

Su, Zhongfeng, Chenfeng Wang, and Mike W. Peng (2022). Intellectual property rights protection and total factor productivity. International Business Review (in press).

Peng, Mike W. and Nishant Kathuria (2021). COVID-19 and the scope of the firm. Journal of Management Studies, 58 (5): 1431–1435.

Boddewyn, Jean J. and Mike W. Peng (2021). Reciprocity and informal institutions in international market entry. Journal of World Business, 56 (1): 101145.

Lebedev, Sergey, Sunny Li Sun, Livia Markoczy, and Mike W. Peng (2021). Board political ties and firm internationalization. Journal of International Management, 27: 100860.

Lebedev, Sergey, Zhiang (John) Lin, and Mike W. Peng (2021). Power imbalance and value creation in joint ventures. Long Range Planning, 54 (2): 102014.

Peng, Mike W., Nishant Kathuria, Fernando Luiz E. Viana, and Afonso Carneiro Lima (2021). Conglomeration, (de)globalization, and COVID-19. Management and Organization Review, 17 (2): 394–400.

Peng, Mike W. (2021). Apple, America, and China in the age of COVID-19. Asian Case Research Journal (in press).

The CAS is partnering with the Japan-America Society for a beginning Japanese language course this summer thanks to the JAS Director and CAS International Board Member, Paul Pass. Be on the lookout for more information!

DR. MING DONG GU

PROFESSOR OF CHINESE AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

SCHOOL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

CENTER FOR ASIAN STUDIES

Dr. Ming Dong Gu, who just completed his 15th year at UT Dallas, has made extraordinary contributions to the university as a scholar, teacher and administrator. From 2007-19, he directed the UTD Confucius Institute. Under his visionary leadership, the Institute flourished by combining cultural outreach for the community with rigorous academic and research initiatives. He internationally renowned scholars to lecture and interact with students. He conceived and organized intellectually challenging symposia and conferences – two of which resulted in two important books (one on translating Chinese literature, the other on the continuing relevance of Confucian philosophy). He established new and strengthened existing relations with major Chinese universities. He championed and helped establish a minor in Asian Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities. When the university decided to replace the CI with the more broadly designed Center for Asian Studies, he graciously accepted my offer to serve as Associate Director, focusing his attention on advancing research and academic initiatives.

Concurrently, Dr. Gu was receiving much-deserved international recognition for his boldly conceived, intellectually rigorous scholarship. The eminent literary critic Prof. J. Hillis Miller described his work as reflecting “immense learning, intellectual sophistication, and conceptual originality,”[fn1] noting his authoritative knowledge of both Chinese and Western languages, cultures, and scholarly traditions. Dr. Gu has published five monographs (four in English, one in Chinese); edited six volumes (four in English, two in Chinese - one of the English volumes a major academic resource), and almost one hundred articles. His two most recent monographs address a seminal issue not only of Asian Studies but indeed of all Humanistic scholarship: communication of ideas across cultures. In Sinologism (2013) he offers a nuanced and richly philosophic discussion of the cognitive preconceptions that distort Western understanding of Chinese thought, culture and art – especially the insistence on approaching Chinese cultural products in terms of Western modes of perception, categorization and analysis. Even Chinese scholars, he argues, have internalized and apply Western conceptual models to their own cultural materials. His book Fusion of Critical Horizons in Chinese and Western Language, Poetics, Aesthetics (2020) - seems to me in part an attempt to resolve the intellectual dissonance that Sinology examined; for in it he challenges Western scholars to abandon current models of comparative Asian-Western studies that overemphasize “difference” in favor of a “humanistic” approach based on a metaphor of a dialogue between cultures. As I read, Prof. Gu’s insistence on fusing disparate aesthetic traditions into a “global aesthetics” and his ongoing exploration of unity within differences called to my mind (high praise indeed) Alexander von Humboldt. Like Humboldt, he brings a combination of analytic acuity and aesthetic wonder to his search for understanding. I am tempted to regard Prof. Gu’s attentiveness to aesthetic commonalities across cultures as analogous to Humboldt’s invention of isotherms (lines connecting points around the globe experiencing the same temperatures) that transformed the understanding of weather and climate. Prof. Gu seems intent on nothing less than transforming our perspective on aesthetics from local to global.

Dr. Gu is an exemplary colleague, an internationally renowned scholar with an adventurous intellect who also generously devotes his expertise and energy to the goal of enhancing the role, quality and educational impact of Asian Studies at UTD.

1. J. Hillis Miller, foreword to M. D. Gu. Sinologism (Routledge, 2013), p. xiv

Dennis M. Kratz

Become a Gong Fu Panda!

2022 UTD Chinese Language and Culture Summer Camp.

June 13 – July 1, 2022. Monday – Friday, 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM

We still have a few spots left, and it's not too late to register! Registration ends along with tuition payment due on June 1. Please use the button below to secure a spot for your child(ren) on a first come, first served basis:

For more information and help with the registration system, visit the Camp page on the Center for Asian Studies at UTD website:

The arrival of “academic summer” always inspires me to read widely. Here are some recommended titles – some that I have already read, one that I am currently reading, and several that I look forward to reading.

My first recommendation reflects a sense that CAS has not placed sufficient emphasis on India and South Asia – a situation that we are committed to improve. Two works about India begin my personal list and recommendations:

Several year ago, Amartya Sen gave a spellbinding lecture about his life and dedication to better the lot of humanity. He mentioned at that that he considered himself a “citizen of the world.” At that time, I had just read that Albert Einstein once answered a request for his home address with the German word “ohne” [“without”]. It is an inescapable fact that that we all are citizens of both a locality and the world.

This novel has an intriguing setting: a “death hostel” in Kashi, the place where Hindu pilgrims come for a good death. I know too little about Hindu faith and practices, and three separate friends have recommended it.

The growing focus of the Center for Asian Studies on Asian American Studies in part inspired this choice – strengthened by a long-standing interest in the role of Chinese laborers in constructing the transcontinental railroad. Mae Ngai’s first paragraph announces that her purpose in writing the book is to “slay the coolie myth” of the Chinese workers as “slavish, without individual personality or will and pathetically oppressed.” I am currently on page 134 and riveted. This is an important book that adds another dimension to American attitudes regarding China and Chinese.

I believe that I made clear my admiration for my colleague’s scholarship. This is another important book - that both extends and corrects Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism as it pertains to China. Essential reading on seminal issue of Asian Studies.

Since I Regularly offer a course that emphasizes the way that the continuous rewriting by modern authors of “classics” demonstrates the vitality of the Western Literary Tradition, it was impossible to resist this re-imagining of The Brothers Karamazov set in a Chinese restaurant in a small Wisconsin town.

Email: asianstudies@utdallas.edu
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