FLAS fellows

Jay is a PhD student in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Asian Studies. He is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork in Taiji, Japan, known for its whale and dolphin hunts, examining the reaction of the town to international media pressure against the hunts. He previously worked as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo for news organizations such as the Associated Press and Dow Jones. He received his master's degree from Kansai University in Osaka and his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He was raised in Phoenix, a short drive from ASU's downtown campus.  

Sam Billing’s fascination with the process of language acquisition led him to seek his master’s degree in applied linguistics. Later, a deepening interest in Chinese history and culture led Sam to the PhD program in East Asian Languages and Civilization at ASU, where he is now immersed in the language, literature, and history of pre-modern China. Sam’s research focuses on how the print publication of literary collections of Song dynasty authors contributed to the shaping of public memory and the making of place in the Song dynasty period.

James Edmonds is a Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University in the Anthropology of Religion tract in the Religious Studies Department. His research is focused on the place of materiality and exchange in the everyday spaces of ethical formation. His dissertation titled, "Hunting Baraka: The Spiritual Materiality and the Material Spirituality reconfiguring the Indonesian Islamic Landscape," takes the performances of Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf across Indonesia and other parts of Asia as spaces in which reconfigurations of piety, identity, and strategies for living Islamically are indexed to Baraka, often translated as blessings. His dissertation seeks to show how Baraka, as both an actors’ category and a theoretical tool, challenges, evades, and redefines Western, Indonesian, and Islamic visions of religion, embodiment, materiality, exchange, and existence. 

Sarah is a second-year art history PhD student, supervised by Professor Claudia Brown. Originally from Seattle, Sarah did her BA in premodern Asian history at ASU and spent her senior year studying Japanese and Japanese history at Wakayama University. She then taught English for two years at elementary schools in Shiga, Japan as a JET Programme participant. Her MA thesis was on landscape and identity in the medieval Buddhist-Shinto mandalas of the Kumano pilgrimage, while her current research involves Meiji-period scientific rationalism and its impact on print culture and literature. Sarah is also currently involved in researching and digitizing the ASU Art Museum's collection of Japanese prints and ceramics, and her work can be found on the ASU Digital Repository. 

I am a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies pursuing research interests in post-colonialism, popular religion, material culture, pilgrimage, and ritual in South and Southeast Asian traditions. My doctoral research focuses on Buddhist encounter(s) with modernity at the site of the Buddha’s birth in Lumbini, Nepal. Thanks to the FLAS Fellowship through the Center for Asian Research I am currently conducting extended fieldwork in Nepal and India. I hold an M.A. from the Iliff School of Theology in Comparative Religion and a B.A. from Colorado State University in Philosophy with a certificate in Religious Studies. I have traveled and conducted research abroad in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Nepal.

Mary “Katie” Kennedy is a first-year Linguistics MA student at ASU pursuing research in the area of Chinese syntax. Graduated from ASU in 2019 with BAs in Chinese and in English with a concentration in Linguistics, Katie's undergraduate honors thesis on Chinese prepositions (a contested grammatical category in this language) offered means to identify and distinguish the grammatical category by analyzing the distribution of prepositions and their syntactic and semantic capabilities. Her current MA research focuses on the effects of pause placement on perceptions of fluency in L2 Chinese speakers, the findings of which will have implications for the areas of second language acquisition, language testing, cognitive-linguistic processing, and speech production for AI. Katie is honored to be named again as a FLAS fellow for the academic year of 2020–2021. 

Lidan Liu is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University. Her research interests are Sino-Korean literature, print culture, book history, and cultural communication and exchanges between Chinese and pre-modern Korean literati. She is working on her doctoral dissertation on an early Chosŏn dynasty poetry selection, Kukcho Sisan [Selected poems of the Chosŏn dynasty] compiled by Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618). She received a Graduate Fellowship supported by the Academy of Korean Studies from March to August 2017, to conduct doctoral research in archives and libraries in South Korea. She is also a FLAS fellow for the academic years 2019–2020 for Korean language study, and 2020–2021 for dissertation research and writing. 

My name is Kelly and I am a senior studying Political Science (BA) and International Relations (MA) as a student in the 4+1 program. My academic work has led me to study abroad in Japan and South Korea, advancing my language skills along the way. Concentrating on international security, I have begun research on war and conflicts in Asia. Specifically, I am investigating how unique aspects of Asian states help break common conceptions of state failure. With the support of this fellowship, I aspire to achieve native fluency in Vietnamese and one day become a U.S. Foreign Policy Adviser for Asian and the Pacific. 

Ranjani Venkatakrishnan is a graduate student majoring in journalism who will be a FLAS fellow for the third year in a row. During her undergraduate years at ASU, she was a Barrett student majoring in Journalism with a double minor in psychology and Japanese. It's been over 3.5 years since she started studying Japanese at ASU and has participated and won prizes at the Annual Arizona Japanese Speech Contest two years in a row in 2017 and 2018. She dreams of being able to fluently speak Japanese one day and travel to Japan to work as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and perhaps someday become Editor in Chief of National Geographic Magazine. She also hopes to someday teach Japanese to students in India, since she always wished she had the opportunity to learn it when she was growing up there.