We are pleased to announce that EALCS Ph.D. candidate Rachel Serena Levine’s article “Dubious Consent: ‘Rape-by-Deception’ in Japanese Courts” has just been published in the Journal of Gender Studies. The article can be read here. Congratulations, Rachel!
Starting this academic year (2025-26), the department will recognize achievement in language study, regardless of a student’s major or minor, with departmental “certificates of language proficiency” and “certificates of advanced language proficiency.” The former will be awarded to students who complete the final quarter of second-year Chinese, Japanese, or Korean with a grade of B or higher. The latter will be awarded to students who receive a B or higher in the final quarter of third-year Chinese or Japanese, or who receive a B or higher in two fourth-year Chinese or Japanese courses (including courses in classical Chinese and Japanese).
2026 Hyung Il Pai Memorial Lecture
WRITING HISTORY IN POST-1987 SOUTH KOREA: THE POLITICS OF TIME AND A POETICS OF REMEMBRANCE
Prof. Namhee Lee (UCLA)
Thursday, February 26, 4 PM
Buchanan Hall 1940
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!
