WELCOME FROM MAR/AAS PRESIDENT
I am delighted to welcome you to the 53rd annual conference of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies! We are thrilled to return to the University of Pittsburgh after ten years for what will no doubt be another highly successful and memorable conference. Its vibrant, urban campus boasts a thriving Asian Studies program which offers majors in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, certificates at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and expertise spanning East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Linda Lieu, our site manager, and Dr. Kirsten Strayer, program manager for this year’s conference. Linda, along with her team, has been instrumental in coordinating our panel rooms, catering, speakers, musical performances, and dozens of other details behind the scenes that make a gathering of this magnitude happen. As was the case in 2015, this year’s conference is one of the largest in MARAAS history.
We are also grateful to the ongoing support of the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh: from Dr. Joseph Alter, Director of the Asian Studies Center, Dr. James Cook, Associate Director of the Asian Studies Center (and former conference site manager in 2015) and Dr. Jessica Sun, Assistant Director for Academic Affairs. Dr. Patrick Hughes, Interim Director of the National Coordinating Site for the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia (NCTA), planned and hosted the Teaching Asia Workshop, held in conjunction with the conference.
Our keynote address will be given by the Journal of Asian Studies editor Dr. Joseph Alter. Our Distinguished Asianist Award this year goes to Dr. Ruth Mostern and will be presented at the banquet on Saturday evening. Professor Mostern is well known for her work directing the Institute for Spatial History Innovation here at Pitt; her most recent monograph The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History received the Joseph Levenson Prize from the AAS in 2023. This year we would also like to recognize the contributions of Dr. Fred Clothey, who for many years taught Religious Studies here at the University of Pittsburgh and was highly regarded for his ethnographic fieldwork and studies of religious practice in India. We are thrilled to honor all these distinguished scholars and educators this weekend.
As you attend the panels, please make note of outstanding graduate student presenters and nominate them for one of the MARAAS graduate student paper prizes on East, Southeast, and South Asia. Nomination forms will be available throughout the venue, or you may use the electronic submission via QR code in your program. The best of these papers will be selected as winner of the Marlene Mayo Graduate Paper Prize which also awards $500 to the winner. The Mayo Prize winner is also eligible for participation in a panel at the annual AAS conference and will receive financial assistance for travel and accommodations to that meeting.
I am grateful for the service of our current officers and members of the advisory council and look forward to working further with our incoming president, Dr. Suzie Kim of the University of Mary Washington. Most importantly, thanks to each of you for attending the conference and sharing your research. Some of you have travelled great distances while others are based right here in Pittsburgh. I look forward to attending the wide and varied slate of panels this weekend and hearing about your scholarly work.
Erik Ropers
2025 MARAAS President