Monmouth College to host symposium on medieval Japan on Oct. 26
Monmouth College history professor Michelle Damian will be one of the featured speakers at a symposium on medieval Japan, which will be hosted on campus Oct. 26.
Titled “Travel, Trade, and Trauma in Medieval Japan,” the symposium will begin at 2 p.m. in the Barnes Electronic Classroom in Hewes Library. It is free and open to the public.
“It’s a pretty unusual opportunity to have this kind of conference at a place like Monmouth,” said Damian. “It is fairly specialized, but I think that’s one of the things that makes it interesting. Travel, trade and violence – these are all things that people can grab onto, even if you don’t have a whole lot of background in Japan.”
Joining Damian will be scholars Kendra Strand from the University of Iowa and Peter Shapinsky from the University of Illinois-Springfield. The three professors will each present research papers, and students from three Monmouth classes – “Introduction to Asian Studies” and “Maritime Archaeology,” plus an English course, “On Orientalism” – will prepare responses to the papers.
The three student responders will be Frida Gonzalez ’21 of Chicago, Emma Hildebrand ’21 of Mendon, Ill., and Will Stefanisin ’20 of Downers Grove, Ill.
Damian’s paper is titled “Salt, Shipping and Sea Captains: Maritime Trade in Late Medieval Japan.”
An assistant professor of Japanese literature and visual culture, Strand will present a paper titled “When Elegance Becomes Inconvenient: Violence in Word and Deed in Nijo Yoshimoto’s Ojima no kuchizusami.”
Shapinsky, who teaches history, wrote “Mapping the Sulfur Road: Japanese Maritime Cartography and Regionality in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.”
“It should be a good mix of papers,” said Damian. “It’s a good encapsulation of this late medieval period in Japan when it was a time of unrest, a time of pushing boundaries.”
The event will conclude with a panel discussion by all the speakers.
Monmouth College Wind Ensemble to present Oct. 27 concert
As the World Series plays out in the cities of Houston and Washington, D.C., Monmouth College’s Wind Ensemble will tip its collective hat to baseball at its Oct. 27 concert.
Free and open to the public, the concert will be held at 2 p.m. in the Kasch Performance Hall of Dahl Chapel and Auditorium.
The concert will open with the piece “Early Light” by Carolyn Bremer, which is a musical play on the “Star Spangled Banner,” inspired by Bremer’s love for baseball.
Under the direction of Stacy Dziuk, the Wind Ensemble will also feature the works of Alfred Reed, Percy Grainger and Malcolm Arnold.
“The Wind Ensemble has continued to grow as we welcome 10 new freshmen to the ensemble this fall,” said Dziuk, who joined Monmouth’s music faculty in 2017.
***Report Courtesy of Monmouth College***
