2020-21 Coleman-Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities

The OHC’s Sherl K. Coleman and Margaret E. Guitteau Professorship in the Humanities promotes the development of new or substantially revised interdisciplinary undergraduate humanities courses which focus on significant intellectual and cultural questions and their history. Coleman-Guitteau courses employ pedagogical approaches that emphasize: open and critical thinking, active student participation, independent inquiry, and the free exchange of ideas.

During the summer of 2020 Kaori Idemaru, Associate Professor of Japanese Linguistics, and Luke Habberstad, Associate Professor of Early Chinese Literature and Religion, developed a new course “Writing in East Asia: From Graphs to GIFs” for the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL) with support from their 2020-21 OHC Coleman-Guitteau Professorship. Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary focus on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing across the broad sweep of human history, their course examines the ways in which the development of scripts and writing systems intersected with state and nation building, identity expressions, and innovation. 

They taught the course during the 2021 winter term with students of various majors, including Global Studies, Business, Linguistics, and Japanese. The course introduced students to linguistic, historical, and cultural features of the three dominant writing systems of East Asia. Over the centuries, writing in China, Japan, and Korea has become inextricably intertwined with the political and cultural worlds of their users, providing key touchstones for the expression of individual and collective identities. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean continue to play this role today, even while communication platforms with a global reach have helped transform them into a digital phenomenon, often driven by innovations developed in East Asia like the emoji. Idemaru and Habberstad sought to give students a broad understanding of the historical development of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as the role of writing in contemporary politics and culture. Their goal was to help their students answer key theoretical questions in the study of writing: What is the difference between writing and symbols? What is the relationship between writing and spoken language? 

They will seek to regularize the course as a 100-level introductory class in the EALL curriculum. Their plan is to reintroduce the course in the 2022-23 academic year. Three other faculty members, a pre-modern literary scholar, a modern literary scholar, and a linguist, are interested in teaching the course. As these faculty teach the course in the future, different aspects of the course will be strengthened and the course as a whole will continue to develop further. 

Kaori Idemaru has experience teaching Japanese and English in the United States and Japan. Her primary areas of research are speech perception and speech learning with a focus on the characteristics of the speech signal and perceptual processes that enable constant perception of potentially variable and ambiguous speech signal. She is an affiliated faculty in Asian Studies.

Luke Habberstad’s research interests include the literature, religion, and material culture of early China (5th century BCE-3rd century CE); early Chinese historical writing; excavated texts; politics and cultures of dynastic and monarchical courts; ancient empires; and religious ritual. He is affiliated with Religious Studies and Asian Studies. His monograph Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles was published by the University of Washington Press in 2018. He worked on the book while he was a 2015-16 OHC Faculty Research Fellow.