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Asian Studies faculty win book awards
Two UB faculty members affiliated with the university’s Asian Studies Program—one from the Department of History, one from the Graduate School of Education—have received national awards for work in their fields.
Ramya Sreenivasan, assistant professor of history, has received the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies for “The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in Indian History, c. 1500-1900” (University of Washington Press, 2007).
She accepted the award at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference, held recently in Chicago. The award, which honors the author of the best English-language work in South Asian studies, is named for the pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art.
In her book, Sreenivasan explores the story of the medieval Rajput Queen Padmini, whose legend was refashioned by early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities as they shaped their distinctive narratives of the past. She analyzes versions of the narrative that range from 16th-century Sufi mystical romances to late 19th-century nationalist histories.
Yoshiko Nozaki, associate professor of educational leadership and policy, has received an Outstanding Book of the Year Award from the American Educational Research Association Division B (Curriculum Studies) for her recently published “War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges” (Routledge, 2008).
She was honored recently at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego.
Nozaki’s book addresses the controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down information regarding Japan’s occupation of neighboring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) and have been challenged by critics who favor more critical, peace-and-justice perspectives.
This contentious issue goes to the heart of Japan’s sense of itself as a nation. Nozaki sets the controversy in the context of debates about memory and education in relation to evolving politics within Japan and in Japan’s relations with its neighbors and former colonies and countries it invaded. It discusses in particular the struggles of Ienaga Saburo, whose crucial challenge to the official government position includes three epic lawsuits.
In addition, a third book by Asian Studies faculty member Thomas Burkman, “Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1915-1938” (University of Hawaii Press 2007), was nominated for the American Historical Association’s John K. Fairbank Prize and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize.
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