2011
Junior Faculty Research Development Grants of 2010-11
Robert Chi
Assistant Professor, UCLA, Asian Languages and Cultures
Stage Sisters: A Cross-Cultural View of Chinese Cinema
Stage Sisters: A Cross-Cultural View of Chinese Cinema employs a case study of the Chinese film Stage Sisters and its actual and imaginary representations of women in cinema. The film revolves around two Chinese opera actresses during 1935 to 1950, examining old-fashioned ‘feudal’ society and values, the materialistic temptations of one woman and the political awakening of another. Using cinema, the study cross-culturally examines Chinese modernity and the influence of popular culture.
Marissa Lopez
Assistant Professor, UCLA, English
Making the Mexican-American Body: Ruiz de Burton’s Political Economy
Making the Mexican-American Body: Ruiz de Burton’s Political Economy explores how the language of bodily and racial health can be understood in the political economy of 1870s California, and is expected to mature into an analysis about the intersections of language and the body in Chicana/o literature. Specifically, the project examines the correlation between the Southern Pacific Railroad’s re-shaping of Mexican land and the racialization and debasing of the Mexican American body during the 1870s, as illustrated in de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don. Lopez had an article titled "Sentimental Mexicans in Nineteenth-Century California" published in CSW's February 2013 Newsletter. You can view her article here.
Sung-Deuk Oak
Assistant Professor, UCLA, Asian Languages and Cultures
American Missionaries and Nursing in Korea, 1895-1915
American Missionaries and Nursing in Korea, 1895-1915 examines the introduction of modern nurses in Korea. Previously unstudied, the project explores the first American Missionary Nurses in the region and their work, the first Nurses Training Schools, and finally the relationship between the Japanese colonial system and American and Korean hospitals and nursing systems. The project is intended to not only study the important roles of Korean women, but explore the significant contributions of American women in Korea.
Project Update, October, 2011: Based on Professor Oak’s research and editorial works, the Korean Nurses Association in Seoul will publish Sources of History of Nursing in Korea, Volume 1, 1885-1911 in October of 2011. It will be published in both English and in Korean. Professor Oak used the Faculty Development Grant to travel in August of 2010 and expand the project. He made two extended research trips, in the summer and fall of 2010, to collect materials and to do editorial and translational works for the first volume of the five-volume series of nursing history in Korea before 1945. This kind of series has never been attempted before, and the nursing history has been largely neglected in Korea until now. He hopes that its publication will stimulate in-depth academic researches on the history of medical and nursing works in early modern and colonial Korea from the woman's (especially nurses') perspective.
