Interviews – UH Press

Interview: Asian Perspectives editors Mike T. Carson and Rowan K. Flad

Posted on August 7, 2018 by journals

Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific is co-edited by Mike T. Carson and Rowan K. Flad from different parts of the globe. Carson, at the University of Guam, first joined Laura Junker (editor, 2001-2015) as co-editor to help manage a smooth transition to a new team. Flad, at Harvard University, joined Carson as co-editor for Volume 54.

Flad’s expertise lies in the archaeology of China and East Asia in general, and Carson’s work focuses on Pacific Oceania and Southeast Asia. Given the journal’s vast and diverse scope, they consult on manuscripts, identify peer reviewers, and work with the editorial board through frequent email communication and monthly online video chats with assistant editor Nat Erb-Satullo of Oxford. Here they reflect on the journal’s history and future.

In his Introduction to the first issue of Asian Perspectives, dated the summer of 1957, founding editor Wilhelm Solheim wrote that the goal was “to improve communications between scholars working within the field of Far Eastern pre-history,” but that “[w]e can not at present confine ourselves to the ‘field’ of Far Eastern prehistory as it has not been established as a ‘field.’”

These decades later, what issues or questions are particularly relevant in your field?

Rowan K. Flad: We still endeavor to connect scholars working within the broader field of Far Eastern pre-history, although we are decidedly open about the geographic and chronological boundaries of relevant scholarship. We engage the interests of our broad readership by ensuring that the reviewers of each article represent varied perspectives. One challenge is ensuring that the various strains of the discipline of archaeology, from the very scientific, to the more humanistic, continue to be represented in ways that encourage dialogue.

"<em — *Asian Perspectives* co-editor Mike Carson at the Ritidian Site in Guam in 2008. Photo by Diego Camacho, courtesy of the editor.

Mike T. Carson: The journal embraces a liberal view of the archaeology of the Asia-Pacific region. When the journal was formed more than 60 years ago, the region was sorely under-represented in world archaeology and most scientific disciplines. At that time, the journal editors made an effort to accommodate perspectives beyond European and North American views of the “Far East.” The journal became known as a venue for publishing and learning about archaeological findings from many different Asian and Pacific sub-regions, emphasizing their inter-connections.

Every year, we learn more and more about the archaeology of every geographic area throughout the region. The journal maintains its role in communicating these new discoveries, now taking advantage of internet access, digital databases, and an increasingly interconnected global society of scholars. In these ways, we hope that Asian Perspectives will continue to elevate the profile of the Asia-Pacific region.

Is there an issue that you’re particularly proud of?

MC: I am equally proud of every issue of the journal in terms of its admirable quality and new information. Over the last decades, the journal occasionally has fluctuated in its production schedule, but we now have regained a steady flow of regular output. I am pleased every time we publish a new issue on schedule.

RF: We take pride in having managed to produce the journal rapidly without sacrificing the high quality of editing our readers have come to expect (due in large part to the expert technical skills of our Managing Editor, Dr. Jaida Samudra). We believe that this is because the journal is published by a university press and therefore not subject to some of the pressures that journals published by large for-profit consolidators seem to be under.

We are excited about an upcoming issue focusing on Korean archaeology that includes some real quality articles.

Where is Asian Perspectives going next?

"<em — *Asian Perspectives* co-editor Rowan Flad at the Bingling Si grottoes, China. Photo courtesy of the editor.

RF: We are still revamping the style of the journal and finding ways to incorporate new directions in data production and data sharing, without sacrificing the traditional format that has always worked well for Asian Perspectives.

MC: Like any academic journal, Asian Perspectives continually must adapt to new production technologies, changing needs of our readership, and the standards of represented scientific disciplines. Lately, we have adjusted the appearance of the journal, begun including color images in the online version, and improved the functionality of the manuscript management system.

We expect to see more improvements over the next few years, especially concerning the increasing use of languages other than English in personal and place names and bibliographic references. We would be happy to learn what our readers and contributors might want to suggest for the future.

Do you have any advice for academics interested in submitting to Asian Perspectives?

MC: Prospective authors may wish to explore online information about the journal, our style guide, and examples of recently published issues. These explorations will enable prospective authors to gain a good sense of the scope of what we publish.

We encourage potential contributors to contact us in advance about the suitability of new work for the journal. Sometimes, we can suggest modifications, refinements, or expansion of the scope of new work. In some cases, we might see how a proposed article could interface with other manuscripts already in review.

RF: It is always a good idea to write to tell us what you hope to publish to see if it is a good fit for the journal. We very much appreciate thorough cover letters that explain the impact of the proposed article and its main point and audience. We particularly appreciate this if you are sending in a revision to a previous submission that has been returned with reviewer comments. Taking all reviewer comments seriously and addressing them explicitly makes it much easier to consider the revision for publication.

Learn more about Asian Perspectives, peruse journal content, and check out the journal’s online manuscript management system.

Interview: The Contemporary Pacific editor Alexander Mawyer

Posted on January 29, 2018April 12, 2018 by uhp-guest

Alexander Mawyer‘s passion for Pacific Island studies is contagious, and has led him to a prolific career in Hawai`i and abroad. As a graduate of the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa and the University of Chicago, he has conducted research with the Mangarevan community in the Gambier and Society Islands of French Polynesia. He has also served as coeditor of Varua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia and contributed a chapter for the UH Press volume At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands. As an associate professor, he has worked on research involving the languages of Eastern Polynesia and sovereignty issues, and has served as co-director of the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific in Oceania at UH Mānoa. With Mawyer now at the helm as editor upon its 30th anniversary, and with the launch of a new website for the journal, we asked him to share his approach to gleaning and organizing the content for The Contemporary Pacific.

What led you to become an editor in this field?

What a striking question! You make me think of Borges’s garden of forking paths, wherein stories ramify, intersect, cross over and back, and all paths turn out to have many beginnings and few, if any, evident ends . . . still a few thoughts come to mind. In the summer after college, I found myself in Honolulu and, among other things, volunteering as an editorial assistant for MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, which Frank Stewart and Robbie (Robert) Shapard had founded some years earlier.

Looking back, that was a serendipitous moment. Still in its first decade, I happened to be present while MĀNOA was coming into its own with growing national and international recognition. I got to know passionately committed local thinkers and writers such as Mahealani Dudoit, who founded ‘Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal in 1999 and who was very often in MĀNOA’s offices in those years. I was trained as an editorial assistant and later as assistant to the managing editor by the inimitable and formidable Pat Matsueda. Frank, Pat, Mahealani, and others on the staff and around at the time were inspiring for their commitment to the ethical imagination and the transformative potential of the inked page.

At some point during my first months with MĀNOA, Frank asked me to write a review of Vilsoni Hereniko’s then freshly published Woven Gods. Vili, a professor at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, had just edited an issue of MĀNOA dedicated to Oceanic and Pacific Islander writers and writing. At the time, this literary space was almost entirely out of view for those not themselves seizing the pen in home islands and communities. I suppose my review was not a complete disaster since Frank suggested that Vili would enjoy lunching and chatting about my review. As I discovered, Vili’s scholarly spirit expands to fill whatever space he’s in and, somehow, by the end of that lunch he had more or less talked me into doing an MA in Pacific Islands Studies.

A year later, after my MA, I moved to Chicago for my doctorate and did not imagine (and, I think, could not have imagined) that I would ever have the privilege of serving as the editor of The Contemporary Pacific. I am confident that any number of other more recent experiences could be identified as part of the story-garden for how I came to take on this editorship. But in retrospect, I’m struck by how early career experiences play out over years, by how unexpectedly paths cross and re-cross, and by how the kindness of intellectual and professional mentorship was a planting that continues to flower and bear fruit.

Each issue includes a Political Reviews section. Tell us about the section appearing in vol. 30, no. 1.

Our Political Reviews alternate between issues in which they are devoted to the countries, territories, and states of Polynesia and Micronesia, and issues in which the reviews are devoted to those of Melanesia. The Political Reviews section that includes the reviews of our Melanesian neighbors also includes a single review of the region as a whole over the course of the preceding year. vol. 30, no. 1, features Micronesia in Review: Issues and Events, 1 July 2016 to 30 June 2017 with reviews of the Federated States of Micronesia (by Clement Yow Mulalap), Guam (by Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Elizabeth Ua Ceallaigh Bowman), and the Marshall Islands (by Monica C Labriola), and Polynesia in Review: Issues and Events, 1 July 2016 to 30 June 2017 with reviews of French Polynesia (by Lorenz Gonschor), Hawai‘i (by ‘Umi Perkins), Māori issues (by Margaret Mutu), Norfolk Island (by Chris Nobbs), Pitcairn Island (by Peter Clegg), Rapa Nui (by Forrest Wade Young), and Tonga (by Steven Ratuva).

These reviews are among our most used and cited pieces over many years. There is really nothing like them published elsewhere and their value is non-diminishing in time. Actually, it seems to me that their value is only increasing, given how poor our individual and collective powers of memory are and how, with each subsequent review, year after year, for each Pacific Islands country or territory, this islands’-eye-view of the political ebb and flow becomes ever richer as a record of the volutions and convolutions of local politics.

What have I learned in the most recent issue? Oceanic politics are wonderfully local but islands are, always were, also global, and the butterfly winds disturbing wildflowers in the continental distances are not always soothing breezes when they arrive in Pacific places. Similarly, the stirrings of regional leviathans touch lives within, across, and far beyond Pasifika communities.

TCP also carries its fair share of reviews, from media to books. Do you have any advice for reviewers interested in writing for your journal?

We do! I actually served as reviews editor for a number of years and regularly try to inculcate in my graduate students a sense of the value of the review literature to their present and future scholarly practice. Advice for potential reviewers? If a recent volume (or film or exhibition) with geographical placedness in Oceania emerges for which one feels a sufficiency of expertise to review, please feel free to reach out to suggest the possibility!

We are always looking for new reviewers, especially graduate students for whom reviews are a wonderful way of cutting teeth on the publication process, professionalizing one’s writing craft, and pushing back against the spirit-bruising isolation of the mind with which many scholars are all too familiar.

Beyond that, I’m often struck by how difficult it can be for reviewers to keep in mind the review genre’s trinity-like nature. Impactful, timeless, and productive reviews usually seem to have something of the quality of reflecting the reviewer’s irreducibly individual, personal take on the work, as well as reflecting the way the work is positioned within relevant literatures, within the already-existing conversation around the relevant empirical or conceptual material, as well as reflecting the way the work is positioned with respect to Pacific Studies or to the region.

Great reviews are individual, collective, and worldly and often reflect wildly productive tensions between these different commentary-domains.

“Homegrown, Green #1,” by Maika’i Tubbs, the featured artist in vol. 30, no. 1. Push pins, plastic plates, forks, wood, 5″ x 11.5″ x 3″. Photo courtesy of the artist. From the issue: “This work is one of a series of miniature trees Tubbs made from office supplies while thinking about the way we may yearn for nature, try to control it, and sometimes force it to dwell in places we do not wish to be.”

The Contemporary Pacific recently introduced a new website. What can readers find there?

Super of you to notice this too! Strangely, we’ve not ever had a website before that was dedicated solely to TCP. In the last six months we have developed an SMS strategy and have a website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed. Our goals were not over-ambitious. We wanted to make it easier for the journal to be perceived as an integral whole, particularly now in our 30^th anniversary year! We wanted to promote the visibility of current, future, and recent numbers, as well as issues from deeper in time. We have a classic article of the month, highlight past featured artists, and make it easy to search for particular authors or by keywords. Although it’s only been online for a couple of months so far, we’re already thinking about how the site might further develop, including better tools for potential authors!

Click here to view our new website.

What work are you most proud of since joining The Contemporary Pacific?

I suppose every institution is a bit like Theseus’s ship, in a state of constant self-becoming through renewal. Nevertheless, TCP is in a period of striking transitions. Robert (Bob) Kiste, former director for the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, and who really was the motivating force behind the journal’s founding, recently passed away, as did long-time board member Ben Finney, who was well-known for his role in the vitalization of Polynesian voyaging. Some cherished colleagues who have been key in the journal’s direction and management have recently left the board to take on remarkable new positions, such as Maenette K. P. Ah Nee-Benham, previously Dean of the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge and now Chancellor of the University of Hawai‘i—West O‘ahu, while others are anticipating retirement in the coming semesters. So, over most of my tenure as Editor we’ve been working behind the scenes to think about the bones, ligaments, and tendons of the journal—timelines, guidelines, frameworks and scaffolds for the editorial process, supports for authors, and the needs of readers and our regional communities. While perhaps not visible in any recent issues’ pages, all of this work is intended to insure that the journal’s next 30 years have the opportunity to be as rich and impactful as the prior 30. As part of this work, we’ve recently given the journal, and its current and past issues, an online presence. This was wildly overdue! I’m proud of these ongoing initiatives oriented towards the journal’s foundations and imagined futures.

What’s next for The Contemporary Pacific?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the old quip that time is a scythe, certainly true for plans and expectations. I hesitate to prognosticate too far into the future. Still, we do have wonderful work lined up for the next several issues. Currently we are well into preparation of a special issue titled Possessing Paradise, guest-edited by Siobhan McDonnell and Kalissa Alexeyeff. Featuring diverse approaches to and examinations of the ways in which ideas of ‘paradise’ are brought to bear on Oceania’s peoples and insular places, we hope the issue (TCP 30:2) will be an impactful return and fresh engagement with this persistent trope.

Further out on the horizon, we have recent submissions on experiences of Oceanic environments and conservation needs, about which I am personally very excited. As I mentioned above, 2018 is TCP’s 30^th anniversary year. In fall 2018, we will reach 60 numbers in print! We are looking forward to some sort of celebratory event during that semester and hope many in the community will join us! Please do!

To receive an email when new issues of The Contemporary Pacific publish online, click here to sign up at Project MUSE.

About the Journal

The Contemporary Pacific provides a publication venue for interdisciplinary work in Pacific studies with the aim of providing informed discussion of contemporary issues in the Pacific Islands region.

Subscriptions

Single issue sales and annual subscriptions for both individuals and institutions available here.

Submissions

Submissions must be original works not previously published and not under consideration or scheduled for publication by another publisher. Manuscripts should be 8,000 to 10,000 words, or no more than 40 double-spaced pages, including references. Find submission guidelines here.

Interview: Buddhist-Christian Studies editors

Posted on November 20, 2017 by bentone

Buddhist-Christian Studies is one of four society journals currently published by University of Hawai`i Press. The journal started here in Honolulu as the product of the 1980 East-West Religions Project conference titled “A Buddhist-Christian Conference on the Future of Humanity,” and it was first edited by UH professor emeritus David W. Chappell. We asked current co-editors Thomas Cattoi and Carol Anderson to share more about the society and the journal’s focus.

sbcs

First, what is the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies?

The Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was founded in 1987 in order to continue interactions between Buddhist and Christian scholars and practitioners that began at several large international meetings in the early 1980s. In 1980 and again in 1984 two major international conferences were held at the University of Hawai’i, which led to the establishment of the “Cobb-Abe International Theological Encounter.” The latter was founded by process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr., and Kyoto-school philosopher Masao Abe; for the following twenty years (1984-2004), the Cobb-Abe group continued to meet every eighteen months to discuss issues connected with Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

In 1987, another large international conference on Buddhist-Christian interchange was held at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. At that meeting, a small group of scholars and practitioners decided to establish a society that could meet annually in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion (AAR). This led to the birth of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. The Society is independent of the AAR and controls its own program, rather than being a section of the AAR. Most members are scholars and graduate students in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies, but membership is open to all.

Has Buddhist-Christian Studies changed over the years?

The first issue of the journal was published in 1981. Its content and orientation reflects the evolution of the field over the last few decades, which was influenced by the quick expansion of Buddhist and Asian studies in English-language universities, as well as the growing interest in interreligious dialogue in different Christian communities.

Thomas Cattoi, co-editor of *Buddhist-Christian Studies*

What makes a good interreligious dialogue?

This is an interesting question! Every person engaged in interreligious dialogue will give you a different answer. For me (Cattoi), interreligious dialogue requires the ability to be conversant in two different religious traditions, remaining grounded in one’s own while also engaging the other with integrity. This means that one should be open to points of contact between two traditions, while also acknowledging the presence of irreducible differences.

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Interview: Pacific Science 71:4 special section editors

Posted on October 20, 2017August 16, 2022 by bentone

Published this October, Pacific Science volume 71, no. 4 arrived with a special section on habitat restoration, which includes seven open-access articles. We asked Editor-in-Chief Curtis C. Daehler and guest editors Melissa Price and Robert J. Toonen to weigh in on this issue’s special topic and other research important to the quarterly science journal.

Image of He'eia National Estuarine Research Reserve — This scenic photo shows the He’eia National Estuarine Research Reserve, where some Pacific Science 71:4 contributors did their research. The reserve is managed in partnership by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the State of Hawai’i. (Photo by Manuel Meija of The Nature Conservancy.)

Vol. 71, Issue 4 includes a special feature: “Scaling Up Restoration Efforts in the Pacific Islands.” Why devote a whole section to this topic?

We have lost a lot of native species to habitat destruction in the Pacific region. Today, considerable attention is being given to protecting native ecosystems, for example, in the Hawai‘i Governor’s Sustainable Hawai‘i Initiative to protect 30% of the state’s watersheds by 2030. However, much less attention is given to restoration efforts, or the conversion of nonnative to native-dominated habitats. Invaded ecosystems may be more at risk for wildfires, and may enhance invasions of nearby native ecosystems. A few large-scale restoration success stories exist, such as that of Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, and there are a number of small-scale efforts across the Pacific led by nonprofit groups. In this issue, we hope to promote conversations about how we can scale up restoration efforts to improve resiliency, promote ecosystem services, and reduce extinction rates across the Pacific region.

Koolaus 2 — Melissa Price, guest editor of Pacific Science vol. 71, no. 4, is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, CTAHR, at UH Mānoa. She provided this picture from her field work.

What challenges did you face in the creation of this special section?

The biggest challenges were representing the range of work being done around the Pacific and asking those working at small scales to think about how their work might be scaled-up. Also, a number of projects were just getting started, and it may be decades before there are results from these efforts. Finally, truly transformative work will likely be transdisciplinary. People involved in restoration must partner across sectors to solve challenging problems associated with restoration, such as seed production, removal of invasive plants and animals, and access for equipment and people to remote locations. We still have a long way to go in these areas, but we hope that this special collection will spark productive conversations.

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Interview: Language Documentation & Conservation editor Nick Thieberger

Posted on August 22, 2017October 24, 2018 by journals

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In the fall of 2005, linguistics professor Kenneth L. Rehg and UHM Foreign Language Resource Center director Richard Schmidt planned a meeting with the goal of advancing language documentation and associated activities as a legitimate subfield of linguistics. In the spring, 28 linguists gathered at the East-West Center from as far east as Japan and as far west as New England, and as far south as Australia. As a result of this meeting, the journal Language Documentation & Conservation launched in June 2007.

From the outset, LD&C has been an open access journal because, as founding editor Rehg writes, “In many communities where vulnerable and endangered languages are spoken, any amount charged for a subscription is too much.” In the past decade, the journal has provided 340 articles comprising 10 volumes, totaling more than 661,000 downloads. Below, current editor Nick Thieberger discusses the benefits of being an online-only journal and what’s in store for LD&C as it enters its second decade.

You’ve been with Language Documentation & Conservation since the beginning, starting as the Technology Review Editor and then taking over from founding editor Kenneth L. Rehg in 2011. Can you share with us how LD&C got started and your current work leading the journal?

For background on how LD&C began, please see the recent article by our founding editor. The role of editor involves coordinating production, doing initial assessments of contributions (sometimes with the help of the Editorial Board), finding reviewers, maintaining the website, and updating the Facebook page.

Dr. Nick Thieberger (R) plays audio of the Koita language near Port Moresby to Koitabuan E’ava Geita (L). Picture: Rachel Nordlinger. This image was first published in the Pursuit article, “Islands of language enter virtual reality.”

In Prof. Rehg’s “The Founding of Language Documentation & Conservation” (Vol. 11), he notes that one of the goals of the journal was to “focus … on topics that do not readily find a home in other journals.” How is LD&C unique from other journals in your field?

Issues around language documentation and revitalization have become increasingly relevant in the past decade or two. With the increased focus on language endangerment, more attention is being paid to creating good records of as many different performances and speakers as possible. Performance includes narratives, dialogues, songs, multi-participant events as well as good old-fashioned elicitation.

The journal Language Documentation & Conservation provides a venue for exploring new methods in creating language records and in using records for language revitalization. It is unique in its scope and in the quality of its contributions (peer-reviewed since the first issue in 2007). A topic of particular current interest is the ‘collection overview’ which presents a guide to a set of primary language records, allowing readers to identify its extent and the context in which it was created. We hope that such overviews will become more common in our discipline.

LD&C was designed to be an electronic-only, open access journal, which was uncommon when you launched the journal in 2006. Why was this important then, and why does it remain relevant now?

LD&C has been committed to providing open access from its inception. As so many of the languages that are the focus of language documentation efforts are spoken in small communities, we want to ensure that the research we publish is fully accessible to anyone with Internet access. We ensure longevity of access by lodging all LD&C content in the University of Hawai‘i’s digital repository, linked from our website.

Online publication allows us to produce articles quickly and to embed media to illustrate examples in the papers. It also allows authors to add material incrementally over time.

We encourage subscription, which is free, so that readers can be informed twice a year about new content, which we upload four times a year.

Photo taken at UH Manoa, with a sign that reads "Lose your voice, and you lose your culture." — LD&C Editor Nick Thieberger took this photo at the University of Hawai‘i and posted it on the journal’s Facebook page.

Where is LD&C going next?

We have published a couple of volumes that allow incremental addition of new material over time, taking advantage of the non-book format of online publication. SCOPIC is a volume that will provide a series of papers in the next few years. In the pipeline now is a grammar that will be published incrementally in what would have been called fascicles in the past.

With 11 volumes and 13 special publications now available, is there an issue that you’re particularly proud of?

With 340 articles produced it is hard to choose among them. However, the most popular article has been download over 60,000 times (see the statistics here).

Do you have any advice for academics interested in submitting to LD&C?

Take advantage of the possibilities offered by online publishing. Include media as examples of phenomena discussed in the article, include corpus materials that allow readers to check your analysis and to potentially carry out their own reanalysis of the data.

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About the Journal

Language Documentation & Conservation is a free open-access journal on issues related to language documentation and revitalization. The journal is sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center.

Submissions

Instructions for submission can be found on the Language Documentation & Conservation‘s website.

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Interview: Asian Theatre Review editor Kathy Foley

Posted on July 19, 2017September 1, 2017 by journals

Later this year, Asian Theatre Journal editor Kathy Foley will step down from her post, which she’s held since 2004, and pass the baton onto current area editor, Siyuan Liu. Foley is a distinguished scholar, performer and director based out of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been engaged with the journal since “before it was born.” This summer, Foley shared with us the history of ATJ and highlights from her tenure with the journal.

Learn more about Foley in the recent “Founders of the Field” feature by Margaret J. Caldiron in ATJ Vol. 34, No. 1. A specialist in wayang golek (Indonesian rod puppets), Foley also shared her knowledge with the Asian Art Museum in this short video.

Kathy Foley leads a performance class at the University of Malaya during a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant in 2014. Students rehearse the wilderness scene from the Layla and Majnun story in Mughal Miniatures. (Photo courtesy of Kathy Foley)

Asian Theatre Journal launched in 1984 with an article written by you and, 20 years later, you took over the editorship from Samuel L. Leiter. Can you tell us about your history with the journal and what lead you to become editor of ATJ?

When I was a graduate student at UH and the East-West Center, I and my peers started a mimeographed Asian Theatre Reports, which brought together recent field research of graduate students studying Asian theatre. When East-West Center offered to upgrade this publication, James Brandon suggested instead a full peer-reviewed journal and went to UH Press with his proposal. Thus, in some ways, I feel I have been with journal since before it was born. To have followed in the footsteps of editors James Brandon with Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak and Samuel Leiter—giants of our field—is an honor.

How has Asian Theatre Journal evolved over the years? And what issues are particularly relevant now?

As editor my quest has been to publish fundamental research. Arts and humanities in the American and European University often remain focused on the West—what happens in New York, London, Berlin, Paris is touted as “theatre.” Japan, China, and Singapore, as they developed economic clout, have gotten attention, but I want us to see that Dili and Naha are equally important; that more than the doings of the elite need attention. We need larger vistas. Aesthetic biodiversity, past and present, is important for humans. Art makers mount stages to expand our possibilities as a species. This journal is about widening visions—my own and I hope of readers, too.

In your first editor’s note, you wrote, “Knowledge is crossing oceans and leaping across generations. We are a joint community of teachers and learners.” Today, in addition to articles and translations, the journal features sections on “Emerging Scholars” as well as “Founders of the Field.” How would you describe your approach to editing ATJ?

Jim Brandon started ATJ with a focus on “traditional” forms. As Samuel Leiter came, contemporary play translations and papers by “Emerging Scholars” got space. During my time there has been increasing focus on urban contemporary forms and China has mushroomed. This is not because I dictate it—it comes with the “trends” of trans-national scholarship; gender issues, sexualities, postcolonial thrusts come from what is transpiring in both grad seminars and in the world. We definitely have become more global—graduate student cohorts and assistant professors hail from across the globe.

Kathy Foley (center) performs wayang golek sunda with the clown Semar (light face and black body) and his sons (Astrajingga behind Semar and Petruk facing him). Her puppetry graduate students Michael Schuster (foreground) and Shae Uisna (behind Foley) assist along with UCSC gamelan players. (Photo courtesy of Kathy Foley)

Siyuan Liu and David Jortner edited “Founders of the Field”; it was initially just a way to do more than just mark death of a single important Asian theatre scholar (Andy Tsubaki from University of Kansas). I suggested we talk to our forerunners while they were still around about how/why our field was formed. This “Founders” series ballooned, while seemingly “about” individuals, it really asks more—what is the evolving place of Asian theatre studies in the academy? How did World War II and the Occupation jumpstart our field by creating Japanist besotted with kabuki? How did the 1960s era give Southeast Asian or South Asian theatre focus? How has China after Mao allowed new studies? Looking at lineages is germane to our discipline—the guru, the sensei, the sifu—is “built in” to our training. The 10-week quarter or even the five-year PhD does not work in the same way. That Founder project asked, where do we come from and where are we heading? The next editor may not continue the series on actions and interactions, but will still keep a finger to the pulse.

This year, you pass the editorship onto Siyuan Liu. Looking back on a dozen years at the helm, is there an issue that you’re particularly proud of?

I think that some of the themed issues—Shakespeare in Asia, Kyogen, Malaysian Theatre, Women in Asian Theatre—have been useful, not only because they had good articles, but many of those editors have gone on to bigger editing jobs better prepared. Siyuan Liu, himself, became seasoned as an editor with the “Founders” and is now ready to do the whole.

Colleague Margaret J. Coldiron characterizes your scholarly work as “detailed, accessible, and passionate.” After ATJ, what’s next for you?

After ATJ I’m ready to focus on my own writing. I have so much research I have never really processed while performing, raising kids, administrating, and editing. James Brandon told me when I was a graduate student that single-point focus (then, the dissertation) was something I would seldom experience again. He was right. But Jim actually did his most important writing on kabuki after he passed off ATJ, I hope to follow his example and watch my “to do” list shrink.