Graduation 2021

The department is proud wo announce the winners of our departmental awards:

• The tenth annual Philip Thomas Lincoln, Jr. Memorial Endowment to Swarnim Khare, a PhD student in Asian Languages and Cultures. This fellowship is named for a 1953 LSA graduate who was a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department from 1966 to 1996. Lincoln dedicated his life to the betterment of relations between the United States and the countries of Asia, especially China. The Lincoln Fellowship is given to one ALC graduate student a year to assist with funding a proposed research trip abroad. This award is being used by Swarnim to assess archives in Delhi and Lucknow that are imperative to the completion of her dissertation on a 20th Century prison narratives in India.
• John Decker, a graduating Asian Studies and Political Science senior, has received the 2021 Charles and Myrl Hucker Essay Award. This award was created as a tribute to the scholarly and collegial legacy left behind by Charles O. Hucker, a Professor of Chinese in the department from 1965-1983. It also recognizes the great support and friendship he recieved from his wife, Myrl. The Hucker award is given annualy for the best China-focused essay written in an Asian Languages and Cultures course. John's essay "Love Does Not Discriminate": The Interaction of State Policy, Social Views, and LGBT Music in China was written for the Fall 2020 section of ASIAN 381: Junior/Senior Research Seminar for ALC Majors taught by Professor Ben Brose. His paper discusses "the interplay between public policy, state censorship, traditional values, and social stigma in restricting Chinese LGBT musicians and the lack of LGBT voices as a result".
• Raymond Hsu, a PhD student in Asian Languages and CUltures and Anthropology, has received the Charles and Myrl Hucker Research Award. This award recognizes a graduate student in the area of Chinese studies. Raymond plans to conduct a year-long fieldwork research trip in 2022 to support research on his dissertation which centers on the contemporary religious movement of the Makatao, an Austronesian aboriginal people residing in Pingtung plains of southern Taiwan and their political campaign for official ethnic recognition in Taiwan as well as their religious revival.
• This year's ceremony sees the presentation of the sixth annual Kristin Carosella Memorial Fellowship. Kristin Carosella was a member of the University of Michigan's Class of 2013, earning bachelor's degrees from the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Upon graduation, she pursued a career teaching English to school-age children in China before her death in September 2014. Through generous donations from the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies; the Center for Japanese Studies; the Nam Center for Korean Studies; the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures; the Department of Anthropology; and the Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, this fellowship has been established in perpetuity to honor her life and to inspire other students to pursue service to others through teaching in Asia. The recipient of this year's Kristin Carosella Memorial Fellowship is John Decker. John plans to move to China in 2021 to teach English.

This year, 5 students are graduating with Honors. These students not only complete the Asian Studies major with stellar grades, but they also work closely with a faculty mentor in their senior year to complete an Honors thesis. These students are:

• Yingchao He Fashioning Contemporary Political Leadership in the People's Republic of China; A Case Study of Xi Jinping's Cadre Jacket
• Limmy Kim The Entertainment of Divorce
• Kimiko Varner The End of Mitsubishi Zaibatsu: a Study of SCAP Policy and Opposition
• Ruchi Wankhede When Perceptions Fall Short: Understanding the Relationship Between the Government and Marginalized Groups in China and India
• Ella Daniels will be completing her degree, and her Honors thesis, in the Spring/Summer 2021 term.

Our ceremony concludes by focusing on the graduating Asian Studies majors. This year's class of 24 graduates exemplified the diverse range of academic interests represented in the many areas of study our department offers. In the class of 2021, we are proud to have 9 Chinese Studies graduates, 7 Japanese Studies graduates, 5 Korean Studies graduates, 1 South Asian Studies graduate, and 2 Southeast Asian Studies graduates.

Chinese Studies

Alexander Blanck

Joseph Carpenter

Ella Daniels

John Decker

Yingchao He

Dalia Kaufman

Leanne Olona

Antonio Strang

Ruchi Wankhede

Japanese Studies

Matthew Carroll

Anne Cleary

Heather Duff

Alyssa Knight

Lea Piotrowski

Gretchen Smith

Kimiko Varner

South Asian Studies

Deepali Desai

 One PhD student defended their dissertation this academic year. Kunisuke Hirano completed his thesis entitled Educated to Participate: Interaction and Imagination in Three Alternative High Schools in Contemporary Japan

The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures wishes to extend its sincerest congratulations to all of our awardees and graduates this year.