A new undergraduate program in Asian Languages and Cultures is under development. The plan includes multiple options, such as East Asian studies, South Asian studies, and Southeast Asian studies, as well as a non-region-specific "Trans-Asian" option. These new programs will commence in fall 2019. Students interested in learning more about the program requirements can meet with the undergraduate advisor. Contact Rachel Weiss, rweiss@wisc.edu, for more information. 

Faculty

Asian Languages and Cultures is home to nearly twenty faculty whose research and teaching specialities range from medical humanities in India, the Hinduist roots of yoga, or inflecting contemporary mindfulness practice with insights from Tibetan buddhism, to human rights in Thailand - from Chinese ghost stories, traditional Sinology, and mathematically inflected Chinese philology, to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian - and from critical reading of late-Heian tale fiction, early modern Japanese comedic narratives, and haiku, to manga, anime, and Japanese counterculture.

East Asia

Charo D'Etcheverry (Associate Professor). Area: Classical Japanese Literature

Naomi Geyer (Associate Professor). Area: Japanese Language

Rania Huntington (Professor). Area: Ming and Qing Narrative and Drama, Chinese Literature of the weird and supernatural

Adam L. Kern (Professor). Area: Popular Literature, Culture, Poetry, Theater, and Visual Culture of early modern-modern Japan.

Byung-jin Lim (Associate Professor) .Area: Korean Language and Linguistics, Second / Foreign Language Acquisition, Korean Language Textbook Development

Junko Mori (Professor). Area: Japanese Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics

Takako Nakakubo (Faculty Associate). Area: Second Language Acquisition of Japanese, Japanese Pedagogy

William Nienhauser (Professor). Area: Early Traditional Chinese Fiction and History; early poetry (Du Fu and Tao Qian)

Steve Ridgely (Associate Professor). Area: Modern Japanese Literature, Pop culture, TransAsian studies

Hongming Zhang (Professor). Area: Chinese Linguistics; History of Chinese Language; Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

Weihua Zhu (Assistant Professor). Area: Chinese Language, Pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition

South Asia

Gudrun Bühnemann (Professor). Area: Sanskrit Language and Literature; Buddhism in India and Nepal; Hinduism; Tantrism; Yoga Studies

Anthony Cerulli (Associate Professor). Area: Theory and Method in the Study of Religion in South Asia; History of Medicine in India; Sanskrit Language and Literature; Kerala History and Culture; Malayalam Language.

John D. Dunne (Professor). Area: Buddhist Philosophy and Contemplative Practice; Religious Studies; Cognitive Science of Religion

Southeast asia

Erlin Barnard (Faculty Associate) Area: Indonesian Language, Language Pedagogy; Materials Development; Second Language Acquisition

Tyrell Haberkorn (Associate Professor) Area: Violence, Human Rights, Sovereignty, Arbitrary Detention, Land Rights, Agrarian Struggle, Historiographies of Repression, Gender Studies, Socialism, Dissident Literature, Southeast Asia (Thailand). 

Language instructors

Language instructors are an integral part of our department, teaching more than 14 languages during the academic year from East (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), South (Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Urdu), Southeast (Burmese, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese) Asian Languages.

undergraduate advisor

Undergraduate Advisor:
email Rachel Weiss
1244 Van Hise Hall
608-890-0138

staff

Department Administrator:
email Alyson Amenda
1240 Van Hise Hall
608-262-0524

Financial Specialist:
email Haiyan Wei
1238 Van Hise Hall
608-890-0138