Conferences in Hawaii

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Honolulu for the Zhang Liqing Memorial International Conference on Hanyu Pinyin. This promises to be a tremendously exciting event, with select scholars from throughout the United States, Asia, and Oceania participating. I’ll have more to say about this after the gathering.

While I’m in Hawaii I may drop in on the joint conference of the Association for Asian Studies and the International Convention of Asia Scholars (March 31–April 3). You might think, though, that with nearly 800 sessions on just about everything under the sun, at least a few of them would discuss romanization. (But nooo.) Still, session 282, “Beyond Cultural Essentialism: Neo-Orientalism in Chinese Studies” (Friday morning, 10:15-12:15), sounds interesting, especially Edward McDonald’s talk on character fetishization in Chinese studies. McDonald’s new book, Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese: Challenges to Becoming Sinophone in a Globalised World, also covers this topic.

If you know of anything else particularly interesting going on at the AAS-ICAS conference or in Honolulu at large, please let me know. (For example, what’s the best bookstore there?)

2 thoughts on “Conferences in Hawaii

  1. I go to UH and live near the conference center. If you want to talk to someone from Manoa’s Philosophy department, drop me an email with the address used for this comment. :-)

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