Prof. Howard Chiang has recently been awarded the Dan David Prize, one of the most prestigious awards available in the discipline of history, for his pioneering contributions to the study of modern East Asian thought and culture with an emphasis on the critical study of science, medicine, race, gender, and sexuality.
You can read more about Prof. Chiang’s achievement in The Current and on the Dan David Prize’s website.
Congratulations, Prof. Chiang!
EALCS Japanese lecturer Yoko Yamauchi has recently been awarded the Outstanding Teacher Award by the Teachers of Japanese in Southern California. Congratulations, Yamauchi-sensei, on this impressive achievement!
Prof. Howard Chiang recently won the 2026 Audre Lorde Prize for an Outstanding Article in LGBTQ History from the LGBTQ+ History Association, an affiliate of the American Historical Association, for his article, “Hide and Seek: Elmer Belt, Agnes, and the Battle over Castration in Transsexual Surgery, 1953–1962,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 98, no. 3 (2024): 394–427.
The full citation, which can be found at https://lgbtq-ha.org/prizes/audre-lorde-prize, reads:
Howard Chiang’s deeply researched article makes an important contribution to trans history by shedding new light on the work of urologist Elmer Belt and the cryptorchidism surgical technique he practiced in the 1950s and early 1960s. Making revealing use of Belt’s correspondence, Chiang illustrates how developments in trans medicine were understood and negotiated between doctors and patients and between practitioners of different medical specialities in a particular moment of “transsexual science.” While Belt’s lack of publications later led to his being neglected by historians, Chiang convincingly uncovers “a largely forgotten surgical logic of trans embodiment” and carefully registers the agency of trans patients without obscuring the unequal power relations inherent to the medicalized setting.
Congratulations, Prof. Chiang!
Meagan Finlay, a 5th year PhD candidate studying under Professor Katherine Saltzman-Li, has been awarded the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center‘s Dissertation Fellowship for the 2025-2026 cycle. Meagan’s dissertation, “From Early Modern Kabuki Stages to Modern Screens: Production Practice Legacies and the Crafting of National Identity in Japanese Television Period Dramas”, explores the development of the Japanese period drama genre on TV and the ways in which it has carried over certain characteristics and practices from early modern kabuki. In her work, Meagan is heavily engaged with interdisciplinary methods including archival research, interviews, and observation techniques, and draws upon frameworks from Theatre Studies, Media Industry Studies, and Performance Studies. She is looking forward to becoming an IHC Fellow in the fall!
We are delighted to announce that EALCS PhD candidate Wandi Wang successfully defended her dissertation, “Taste and Gastropoetics in Traditional China, Ninth to Seventeenth Centuries CE,” on May 30, 2025. She has also accepted an offer to take up a position as Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Lehigh University.
Congratulations, Professor Wang!
EALCS is proud to announce that, in addition to a one-year Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Hanne Deleu has also been awarded a prestigious one-year Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Dissertation Fellowship to pursue her dissertation project titled “Milk Matters: Breastfeeding and the Material Body in Modern Japan” under the guidance of Professor Akihito Suzuki, Japan’s most prominent historian of medicine, at the University of Tokyo.
