Mark Bender, chair of Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, was astonished and delighted to receive in one week copies of just-released books by two former DEALL graduate students. 

     The first to arrive was a copy of Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited by Levi Gibbs, an assistant professor in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College.  This volume follows Gibb’s monograph Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China (University of Hawaii, 2018).

     The second book to arrive was Incense is Kept Burning: Folk Literati, Contested Tradition, and Heritage in Contemporary China (Indiana University Press, 2020) by Ziying You, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Wooster College.  The volume follows You’s edited volume (with Lijun Zhang), Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2019). 

     In each case, the books examine emerging understandings of the idea of “tradition” in the context of the rapid socio-economic changes and intangible cultural heritage policies in the world’s largest country. All four of the recent volumes benefited from the close inter-disciplinary cooperation between faculty and students in DEALL and faculty in the OSU Center for Folklore Studies (most notably Amy Shuman and Dorothy Noyes). These ground-breaking volumes, taken together, signal new directions in Chinese folklore studies that are being set by OSU graduates, and reinforce the reality that OSU is a major contributor to international folklore studies. 

Links:

https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/levi-s-gibbs

https://www.wooster.edu/bios/zyou/