Arts & Humanities

Professor Umberto Ansaldo*

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Biography

Umberto Ansaldo started his academic path as a student of Chinese language and literature at the University of Venice, Italy, and went on to earn a PhD in linguistics from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Since then he has been conducting research on languages of East, South, and Southeast Asia with a focus on socio-historical and typological processes. He has also published and edited a number of volumes and articles on Pidgin and Creole languages, their evolution and their historiography. Between 2005 and 2010 Professor Ansaldo led a project that resulted in a comprehensive description and documentation of an endangered contact language known as Sri Lanka Malay. In 2017 he launched the journal Language Ecology with John Benjamins.

In the past two decades Professor Ansaldo has taught at the National University of Singapore, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Hong Kong, where he now heads the School of Humanities. Besides linguistics he has taught courses on modern Asia, conflict studies, and self-defence, and his most recent interest is in higher education management and academic leadership. In July 2018 he will take up a new post as Head of the School of Literature, Arts and Media (SLAM) at the University of Sydney to focus primarily on these aspects of academia.

Outside of work, Umberto is a keen practitioner of martial arts, which he has studied for over 2 decades. He also travels as frequently as possible, occasionally trying to learn a new language, most recently Japanese.

*Professor Umberto Ansaldo is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Dr Yutaka Mino

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan

Biography

Dr Yutaka Mino was born in Kanazawa, Japan, in 1941, and received his PhD in Art History from Harvard University, in 1977. He was appointed associate curator in charge of the Asiatic Department at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in 1976, the curator of the Oriental Art Department at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in 1977, and the curator of the Asian Department at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1985. After Returning to Japan, he was named as the director of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, in 1996, and as the founding director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in 2004. In 2007, he became the Vice Chairman, Sotheby’s North America, the Chief Executive Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Honorary Director, Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. In April 2010, he was appointed as the director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, and in 2012, the director of Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, he was named Honorary Director, Abeno Harukas Museum of Art. Yutaka Mino has organized many exhibitions, and also published individual books and catalogs such as Freedom of Clay and Brush Through Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz’u-chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D. in 1980, and Hakuji (White Ware), vol.5 in the Chugoku Togi (Chinese Ceramics) series in 1998.

Professor Gaurav Desai*

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, USA

Biography

Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke University Press, 2001) and editor of Teaching the African Novel (MLA, 2009) he has guest edited a volume of essays on “Culture and the Law” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.4, 2001), on "Actually Existing Colonialisms" (Journal of Contemporary Thought, 24, 2006), on “Asian African Literatures” (Research in African Literatures, 42.3, 2011), and co-edited a volume of essays on “Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice” (MELUS, 28.1, Spring 2003). Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers University Press, 2005) which he co-edited with Supriya Nair has become a standard reference and classroom text since its publication. Among Desai's other publications are articles in edited collections and journals such as PMLA, Genders, Representations, Boundary2, Interventions, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review and Cultural Critique. Recipient of a residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 2001, Desai has also been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation award for a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, a visiting fellowship at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities at Cambridge University, and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for his research. In 2004, Desai was made a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. His latest book on narratives of Indian Ocean connections between Africa and India, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013) received the 2014 Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and was a finalist for the Bethwell Ogot Prize from the African Studies Association as well as the Asia-Africa Book Prize awarded by the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden.

*Professor Gaurav Desai is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Dr Linda Schwartz

Ambrose University, Canada

Biography

Dr Linda Schwartz is Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Ambrose University (Calgary, Alberta), Canada. Dr Schwartz earned a Bachelor of Music (Composition) from the University of Manitoba, a Master of Music (Composition) from Western University, and a PhD (Interdisciplinary) from the University of Manitoba, specialising in critical theory and music theory pedagogy. Formerly Dean of Humanities at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (British Columbia) and Dean of Professional Studies/Performing Arts at Trinity Western University (British Columbia), Schwartz continues to research and teach in areas of music theory, critical pedagogy, aesthetic philosophy and interdisciplinary hermeneutics. Dr Schwartz is actively engaged in new faculty development, academic planning and programme quality assurance processes, and consults as a specialist in quality assurance and programme design. She publishes on academic leadership and administration in postsecondary education, and is active as a music theory scholar and analyst.

Dr Richard Donovan**

Kansai University, Japan

Biography

Richard Donovan lectures in comparative literature and translation studies in the Faculty of Letters at Kansai University. He has also worked as a translator at the Kyoto City International Relations Office. He obtained a PhD in literary translation studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2012. The title of his thesis was "Dances with Words: Issues in the Translation of Japanese Literature into English". His other areas of interest include Japanese media subculture and environmental technology.

**Dr Richard Donovan is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship. He is Chair of the IAFOR Publications Committee.

Professor Donald E. Hall*

University of Rochester, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA. Prior to moving to Rochester, he was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Dean Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

*Professor Donald E. Hall is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Professor Anne Boddington

Kingston University, UK

Biography

Anne Boddington is Professor of Design Innovation, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Business and Innovation at Kingston University in the UK and recently appointed as the Sub Panel Chair for Art & Design: History, Practice & Theory for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. Professor Boddington has extensive experience of the leadership, management and evaluation of art and design education and art and design research in higher education across the UK and internationally. She is an experienced chair and has held trustee and governance roles across the creative and cultural sector including as trustee of the Design Council, an independent Governor, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), an affiliate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), a member of the executive of the Council for Higher Education in Art & Design (CHEAD) and a member of the advisory board of the Arts & Humanities Research Council. She has an international reputation in creative education and research and has been a partner, a collaborator, a reviewer and evaluator for a wide range of international projects and reviews across Differemt nations in Europe, the Middle East, Southern and East Asia and North America.

Lord Charles Bruce

Japan Society of Scotland, UK

Biography

Charles Bruce (Lord Bruce) has been a member of the International Academic Advisory Board since 2010. He studied at the University of St Andrews, where he received an MA in Economic History; and at the University of Dundee, where he received an MSc in Spatial Planning and Sustainable Urban Design. He manages an historic family estate in Scotland, involved in tourism, hospitality, farming, forestry, property management and sustainable development. He also curates an internationally significant family archive relating to British diplomatic history in South Asia and SE Asia which includes the papers of James Bruce (8th Earl of Elgin) a British proconsul who was responsible for introducing China and Japan to international diplomacy and global trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

Charles Bruce has maintained his family's connections with Japan and India. He is Hon. Patron of the Japan Society of Scotland, Patron of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, and Chairman of the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust. He is also President of The Democracy Forum, the London-based open policy forum for South Asia.

In 2009 he represented the UK at the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Japan, and has subsequently lectured on the close ties which emerged between Meiji Japan and Britain in the nineteenth century. In 2010, he gave the keynote address at the IAFOR conference on the Arts and Humanities, in Osaka. In 2012, he gave the keynote address at an international symposium organised by the University of Edinburgh and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, ‘Cultural Policy and Creative Industries in Japan and Scotland’. In 2014, he gave the keynote address at the IAFOR conference on the Arts and Humanities, in Brighton. He has also spoken frequently in India and the UK on the work of the pioneering sociologist, Sir Patrick Geddes, who introduced town planning to India. He is a contributor to Gitanjali and Beyond, an internationally peer-reviewed journal focussing on the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore.

Professor Chung-Ying Cheng

University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA

Biography

Professor Chung-Ying Cheng is a philosopher-scholar of Chinese and comparative philosophy, and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. He has taught in the Department of Philosophy at University of Hawaii at Manoa as Professor of Philosophy since 1972.

Combining his strong background in both Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy, he was among the first to develop and promote Chinese philosophy in American Philosophical Circles and formalise the discipline of Chinese philosophy as early as 1965. He founded the academic quarterly Journal of Chinese Philosophy in 1973 and has served as its editor-in-chief since then. In 1967 he founded the International Society for Chinese Philosophy, and also founded the International Society for the Yijing in 1985. He is well known for his philosophical studies of the Yijing and in 2006 he published his seminal work: Origin and System of the Yijing (易学本体论).

Professor Cheng has published 32 books in both English and Chinese and more than 300 papers in various fields of philosophy, including Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, Theory of Confucian Philosophy, Creating Harmony, Ontology and Interpretation (eight volumes including one volume on Onto-Hermeneutics, 1999-2011), Philosophy of Yijing Ontology, Collected Papers of Chung-ying Cheng (four volumes), and Onto-Aesthetics.

In recent years Professor Cheng has worked on Kant and reciprocal interpretation of Kantian Philosophy with Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy. He is also engaged in systematising his own philosophy from onto-cosmology and onto-hermeneutics to ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. Following his critical papers on Davidson, Rorty and Searle, he develops a strong interest in re-interpreting American pragmatism of Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey and Rorty in light of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism.

Professor Cheng has held visiting professorships at Yale University, Oxford University, London University and Berlin University. He has also served as the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University and Director of the Graduate Institute of Philosophy at Taida. His current positions include Visiting Professorships at Beijing University and Tsinghua University, Distinguished Chair Professor at Remin University and Visiting Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Professor Myles Chilton

Nihon University, Japan

Biography

Myles Chilton (BA University of Toronto; MA and PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Nihon University. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Chilton has been in Japan for over twenty years, writing about relationships between contemporary world literature and global cities in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and in journal articles such as Comparative Critical Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He also focuses on global English and literary studies in such books as the monograph English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (Routledge 2016); and in chapters in the books The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Literature (Routledge 2015), Deterritorializing Practices in Literary Studies (Contornos 2014), and World Literature and the Politics of the Minority (Rawat 2013). Chilton has also presented papers on these and other topics at universities around the world. He is also on the editorial board of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship.

Professor Georges Depeyrot

French National Center for Scientific Research, France

Biography

Georges Depeyrot is a monetary historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He began his scientific career in the 1970s studying coin finds and joined the CNRS in 1982. After some years he joined the Center for Historical Research in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and is now a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. After his habilitation (1992), he specialised in international cooperative programs that aim to reconsider monetary history in a global approach. He has directed many cooperative programs linking several European countries, including those situated at the continent’s outer borders (Georgia, Armenia, Russia, and Morocco). Professor Depeyrot is the author or co-author of more than one hundred volumes, and is the founding director of the Moneta publishing house, the most important collection of books on the topic of money. Professor Depeyrot is a member of the board of trustees of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.

Professor Said M. Faiq

American University of Sharjah, UAE

Biography

Said Faiq, FRSA, is Professor of Intercultural Studies and Translation at the American University of Sharjah (UAE), where he was Chair/Head of department (2003-07, 2009-10), and Director of the graduate program in translation and interpreting (2002-11). He is a visiting professor at Exeter University (UK). Prior to his current position, he worked in Africa, the Middle East and the United Kingdom (Salford University, (1990-2003), where he was Director of Studies for undergraduate and graduate programs in Arabic/English translation and interpreting; and Leeds University, (1996-1998), where he was visiting lecturer in applied linguistics). He has served as consultant to private and public organisations for educational and related sectors and serves on a number of academic editorial and consultancy boards/agencies. He is an established figure in intercultural and translation studies and allied areas and has directed and examined graduate research (Cambridge, McGill). His publications include Agency and Patronage in Eastern Translatology (co-edited with Ahmed Ankit, forthcoming), Culguage in/of translation from Arabic (co-edited with Ovidi Carbonnel and Ali AlManaa, 2014), Beyond Denotation in Arabic Translation (co-edited with Allen Clark, 2010), Cultures in dialogue: A translational perspective (2010), Trans-lated: Translation and Cultural Manipulation (2007), Identity and Representation in Intercultural Communication (2006), Cultural Encounters in Translation from Arabic (2004).

Dr Alfonso J. García Osuna**

Hofstra University, USA

Biography

Alfonso J. García Osuna has taught at Hofstra University in New York, United States of America, for over thirty years. He specialises in medieval and early modern literature, receiving his PhD (1989) from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He has completed post-doctoral work at the University of Valladolid, Spain, has published six books, and is a frequent contributor to specialised journals. Alfonso received primary and secondary education in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, the place where his family originated and where he grew up. An avid cyclist, he has completed the Road to Santiago, an 867-kilometre route through northern Spain, six times.

**Dr Alfonso J. García Osuna is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities.

Dr A. Robert Lee

Nihon University, Japan (retd.)

Biography

A. Robert Lee, a Britisher who helped establish American Studies in the UK, was Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo from 1997 to 2011, having previously taught for almost three decades at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He now lives in Murcia, Spain. He has held visiting professorial positions in the US at the University of Virginia, Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico.

His academic books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations (1999), with Gerald Vizenor; Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009) and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Has also been responsible for collections like Other Britain, Other British (1995); Beat Generation Writers (1996); China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008); The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes (2010); with Deborah L. Madsen, Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (2010); Native American Writing, 4 Vols (2011), African American Writing, 5 Vols (2013), US Latino/a Writing (2014); and, with Alan R. Velie, The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (2013).

His creative work is reflected in Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007), with Mark Gresham; Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011); and the poetry collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012); Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013); Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013); Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette (2015); Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016); and Aurora: A Spanish Gallery of Image and Text (IAFOR Publications on-line, 2016).

Professor Jeffrey Sommers

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

Biography

Jeffrey Sommers has joined the REMESO, Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University in Sweden as associated faculty. He will work on collaborative research with REMESO faculty that advances their research profile.

Research & Teaching Interests

Research and teaching is conducted on the “spatial fixes” to crises of global capital accumulation. Further research to this end centers on the political economy of Africa’s (and its Diaspora) accelerated integration into new networks of accumulation. Other areas investigated are development studies, developmental states, international political economy and hegemonic transitions.

Dr Drago Štambuk

Croatian Ambassador to Brazil

Biography

Drago Štambuk (September 20, 1950) is a Croatian physician, poet, essayist and an ambassador. Štambuk was born in Selca on the island of Brač. He attended the gymnasium in Split, and the University of Zagreb School of Medicine. He specialised in internal medicine, gastroenterology and hepatology in Zagreb, but worked and lived in London since 1983, where he was engaged in research of the diseases of liver and AIDS. At that early stage of awareness of HIV/AIDS, Dr Štambuk was among the first researchers deeply engaged in trying to understand the now widely known and ubiquitous disease.

After Croatia declared its independence in 1991, he turned to diplomacy. In the sensitive period from 1991 until 1994, he served as the Plenipotentiary Representative of the Republic of Croatia to the United Kingdom. Afterwards, he became Croatia's ambassador in India and Sri Lanka (1995–1998), Egypt (1998–2000) and a number of Arab countries. At Harvard University from 2001 to 2002, and became its Fellow. He has been also the ambassador of Croatia in Japan and South Korea from 2005 to 2010 and is ambassador in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela since 2011.

Štambuk has published more than 50 books of poetry, which have been widely translated,[1] and is regarded one of the leading Croatian contemporary poets. Raymond Carver named him "a real poet". His English books include Incompatible animals (1995), Black wave (2009), And the sea is no more (2011), as well as contributions to the magazine Ploughshares; "Language of dismemberement/Loghat al-tamazzuq" (2000) in Arabic, "El viento de las estrellas oscuras"(2003) in Spanish with the foreword by Antonio Skármeta, "Pierre Nocturne" (2009) in French with a foreword by Guillaume Métayer, "Black wave/Kuroi nami" (2009) and "From nowhere/Museki yori" (2011) in English and Japanese, "Céu no poço" (2014) and "Criação inacabada do mundo" (2015) in Portuguese. He has been granted many international and national literary, arts and peace awards.

Dr Brian Victoria*

Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, UK

Biography

Brian Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska and a 1961 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. He holds a MA in Buddhist Studies from Sōtō Zen sect-affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo, and a PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University.

In addition to a second, enlarged edition of Zen At War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Brian's major writings include Zen War Stories (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); an autobiographical work in Japanese entitled Gaijin de ari, Zen bozu de ari (As a Foreigner, As a Zen Priest), published by San-ichi Shobo in 1971; Zen Master Dōgen, coauthored with Prof. Yokoi Yūhō of Aichi-gakuin University (Weatherhill, 1976); and a translation of The Zen Life by Sato Koji (Weatherhill, 1972). In addition, Brian has published numerous journal articles, focusing on the relationship of not only Buddhism but religion in general, to violence and warfare.

From 2005 to 2013 Brian was a Professor of Japanese Studies and director of the AEA “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH, USA. From 2013-2015 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan where he is writing a book tentatively entitled: Zen Terror in 1930s Japan. Brian currently continues his research as a Fellow of the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies and is a fully ordained Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect.

*Dr Brian Victoria is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

I – Education & Language Learning

II – Social Sciences & Sustainability

III – Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture