Fay Beauchamp, MARAAS 2022 Distinguished Asianist
Fay Beauchamp pioneered an unusual career at a community college stemming from her passion for Chinese and Japanese literature in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural contexts. Professor of English Emerita, Community College of Philadelphia (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1974), she is not actually an Asianist by traditional definitions. MARAAS, however, became her home for many years while she presented her research on fairy tales traveling the globe from pan-Asian sources. An early key publication (Education About Asia, 2001) compared Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Genji’s Akashi Chapter and led to her Oral Tradition (2011) article on the Zhuang story-teller of the first “Cinderella” story, c.850 CE. A Zhuang folklore student translated the article into Chinese and published it in Studies of Ethnic Literature (2019).
Prof. Beauchamp’s impact is much wider than her own teaching and research. Her outreach work has enabled hundreds of faculty locally and nationally to transform their college courses with Asian material. NEH Summer institutes on Japan (1995) and China (1996), organized by the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) of the East-West Center first changed Fay’s career. She founded CCP’s ASDP Regional Center in 1998 with the help of University of Pennsylvania’s Center for East Asian Studies, and in 2009 started CCP’s broader Center for International Understanding. She directed or co-directed five two-year U.S. Education Title VI grants including year-long study of South Asia and Southeast Asia as well as East Asia. She initiated a new CCP student study abroad program, including multiple trips to China, Japan, Cambodia and India. As a Vice President of the Japan Studies Association, she created faculty workshops in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto, and Fukuoka. Since retirement in 2019, Fay has continued to secure Japan Foundation support for JSA, most recently focused on the indigenous Ainu (2020-2022). After her first Education About Asia article, she has published a dozen essays in EAA and served on its Senior Advisory Board.
At MARAAS she will update her research by presenting: “Circling the Globe after that Slipper: New Ideas on the Transcultural Asian Cinderella.” Among MARAAS colleagues, Fay will express deep appreciation for her CCP colleagues David Prejsnar (Past MARAAS President) and the late Diane Freedman (MARAAS’s first Executive Secretary), and for exemplary mentors at the University of Pennsylvania.