Asian Studies Program

E. Taylor Atkins is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. His publications include Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001), winner of the 2003 John Whitney Hall Prize; Jazz Planet (2003); the forthcoming Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-45; and articles in Journal of Asian Studies, American Music, Japanese Studies, positions, and Blackwell's Companion to Japanese History.

E. Taylor Atkins is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. His publications include Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001), winner of the 2003 John Whitney Hall Prize; Jazz Planet (2003); the forthcoming Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-45; and articles in Journal of Asian Studies, American Music, Japanese Studies, positions, and Blackwell's Companion to Japanese History.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom will talk about how the landscape for scholarly writing about China has been shifting. He will draw upon his experiences as a co-founder of the 'China Beat' blog/electronic magazine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author of different kinds of books, ranging from purely academic to general interest publications, as well as magazine and newspaper article, and reflect on the perils and pleasures of trying to combine academic work with writing that seek to connect with general audiences. One theme will be the way that work by scholarly minded freelance writers (like Peter Hessler) and academics interested in experimenting with different kinds of writing (from Jonathan Spence to Geremie Barme) are blurring the line between genres