Glenn Davis was born in Texas, but spent the past four decades living and working in Japan. Davis started off his long career there by earning bachelor's and master's degrees at Sophia University in Tokyo. He later became a foreign correspondent for Business International, a New York-based think tank, and entered the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. Active on various committees there, he was awarded an FCCJ Life Membership in 2007. After serving as editor-in-chief of Tokyo Journal during the 1980s, he moved on to edit the American Chamber of Commerce Journal in Japan and then became bureau chief of UPI's Tokyo bureau in the mid-1990s. He also served as an educator in Tokyo, teaching literature, history and journalism at Tokyo's Hosei University. Finishing his career in Tokyo with a stint as editor for Merrill Lynch Tokyo, he returned home in early 2007. Having published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on Japan.  Glenn is best known for the 1996 book entitled An Occupation without Troops (in English and in Japanese).

David Cook is Assistant Professor of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic Language and Literature, and his Ph.D from the University of Chicago. His dissertation "The Beginnings of Islam in Umayyad Syria during the Seventh and Eighth Centuries" discusses the early history and development of Islam. Research interests include early Islamic history, apocalyptic literature (both classical and contemporary), revolutionary social movements in Islam, historical astronomy, Judeo-Arabic literature and philosophy and popular religion. Currently he is finishing up a monograph on contemporary apocalyptic literature, as well as working on articles on the transmission of Gospel materials into Arabic, historical comets and their influences upon messianic movements and popular beliefs, as well as preparing his dissertation for publication.

J. Won Han

Shih-Shah Susan Huang

Anne Klein is a Professor and former chair in the Department of Religious Studies.  She teaches courses on Buddhist thought and Contemplative Studies, as well as Tibetan language and culture. Her most recent book is Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the Logic of the Nonconceptual, co-translated with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, published Spring, 2006 (Oxford University Press).  Her other books are Meeting Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self, Path to the Middle: Oral Madhyamika in Tibet, the Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshe Tupden, Knowledge and Liberation, and Knowing, Naming, and Negation: A Sourcebook on Tibetan Sautrantika. In press is her first-ever Chantable English translation and discussion of one of two foundational practice texts, Heart Essence, the Vast Expanse: A Story of Transmission forthcoming from Snow Lion Press; the English metre matches the original Tibetan, so it can be sung with the traditional melody. Under Ford Foundation auspices she is currently completing a book entitled The Knowing Body. She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, member of the Executive Council of the invitational American Society for the Study of Religion, and was in the Fall or 2005 an invited Panelist at Stanford University’s Symposium led by HH the Dalai Lama.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University.  He is the author of The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago, 2006), Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001) and Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995). He has also co-edited volumes with Glenn W. Shuck on the history of Esalen and the American counter culture, On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture (Indiana, 2005); with Rachel Fell McDermott on a popular Hindu goddess, Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West (California, 2003); with G. William Barnard on the ethical critique of mystical traditions, Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism (Seven Bridges, 2002); and with T.G. Vaidyanathan of Bangalore, India, on the dialogue between psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (Oxford, 1999). His areas of interest include the comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature, American counter-cultural translations of Asian religious traditions, and the history of Western esotericism, particularly as this complex has encountered and incorporated Asian practices and ideas in the colonial and postcolonial periods. He is presently finishing a history of the Esalen Institute, the human potential center in Big Sur, California, entitled Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, 2007).

Jonathan Z. Ludwig is Senior Lecturer in the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice, where he teaches courses on Russian language, literature, and culture and on Central Asian history and politics. He is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies, the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. A specialist on Central Asia, he has presented papers on the March 2005 Kyrgyz Revolution and on Russian-American cooperation and confrontation in the region as it pertains to the War on Terror. The latter was published in the proceedings of the conference “America, Russia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States: A New Generation Builds New Relationships (April 2006).” He is currently researching the role of China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia.

Steven W. Lewis is Professor of the Practice in the School of Humanities and Director of the Asian Studies Program
at Rice, and the Fellow in Asian Politics and Economics,  Director of the  Transnational China Project and coordinator of the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program at the at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy . His research explores the influence of media in new public spaces in Asian cities, and the development of privatization experiments, energy policy, and central-local government fiscal relations in China and other transition economies.  Lewis received his doctorate in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as the organizing researcher of the Northeast Asia Energy Cooperation Workshops of theEnergy Forum of the Baker Institute, as a lecturer in NCTA and World Affairs Council seminars on globalization in China for Texas teachers, and as an academic advisor to the U.S.-China Working Group of the United States House of Representatives.  Lewis is a frequent commentator on US and Chinese relations for local, national and international media, and is a member of the editorial board of Asia Policy. Recent publications include, “Liquefied Natural Gas from Indonesia: The Arun Case Study” with Fred von der Mehden, in Natural Gas and Geopolitics: from 1970 to2040, (Cambridge 2006), “Political and Economic Implications of New Public Spaces in China’s Global Cities” in Globalization and the Chinese City (Routledge-Curzon 2005), and, “China Views the Middle East,” Qadaya ‘Alamiyya Global Issues 2005.  His CV may be found at http://www.bakerinstitute.org/Persons/bio_slewis.htm

Nanxiu Qian is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature. She received her M.A. from Nanjing University, China (1982), and Ph.D. from Yale (1994). With research interest in classical Chinese literature, Chinese intellectual history, and comparative literature, Qian has published a number of articles and three books, namely, Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yu and Its Legacy (2001); An abridged translation of the Shih-shuo hsin-yu, from classical to modern Chinese, with introductions and annotations (co-author, 1989); and A Guide to Classical Chinese Culture (co-editor, 1986). She has also published poems, essays, plays, and movie and play reviews with Chinese journals and newspapers, including a newly completed traditional Chinese opera, following the life of the most famous Chinese woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084-c. 1155). One of her literary essays won the first prize of the Ninth Literary Award of Taiwan's Central Daily (1997). She is now working on another book project, tentatively titled: Chronicling China's Reform: The Late Qing Women Writer Xue Shaohui (1866-1922). She won two teaching awards while teaching at Nanjing University (1981-1986). Her research has received grants from the National Endowment for Humanities (2000, 2001-2002) and American Council of Learned Societies (2000-2001).

Hiroko Sato is Senior Lecturer of Japanese in the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Obirin University, Tokyo, and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed her doctoral course work in Applied Linguistics at Boston University, where she taught Japanese and worked actively on the Japanese Pedagogy Committee of the New England Association of Teachers of Japanese (1987-1989). In 1993, Dr. Sato helped establish the Teachers of Japanese Language and Culture Association of Texas, where she has given lectures on Japanese Language Pedagogy. She lectured at the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore (1994-1995). Her translation work on The Contribution of Jiudo to Education, by Jigoro Kano was published in Japan in July 1997. She was chosen by the Air Force Office for Scientific Research (AFOSR) to receive a full support to participate a conference and workshop on Technical Japanese held at the University of Washington in June, 1998. This year, she is working on her innovative educational technology project "On-line Learning and Teaching the Japanese Writing System" funded by the Office of Information Technology Services at Rice.

Gautami Shah is founding Lecturer of Hindi at the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University. After her undergraduate studies at Bombay University, she spent a year doing field work among the Munda community in Ranchi, India, and neighbouring villages. She received her M.S. degree in anthropology from Purdue University. During her graduate studies she also pursued Indian classical dance (Bharatnatyam) under Guru Nivedita Rangnekar. For seven years she taught Hindi at Duke University. She was founding Lector of Hindi at Yale University where she started and established a Hindi program of national recognition. Complementing her work in Hindi pedagogy, she maintains an interest in and has taught courses on contemporary South Asian literature with a focus on communal conflicts, gender issues, caste, religion and immigrant experiences.

Elora Shehabuddin is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Rice University. Before coming to Rice, she was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Her dissertation, "Encounters with the State: Gender and Islam in Rural Bangladesh," examined how impoverished rural women understand and negotiate between competing Islamist and secularist discourses in the arenas of law, development, and formal politics. The dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association's Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics in 2002. She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She spent 2004-5 as a Research Associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University. Her publications include articles in Signs, Journal of Women's History, and Asian Survey; chapters in the edited volumes Eye to Eye: Women Practicing Development Across Cultures and Gender, Politics, and Islam; and a book Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Chao-mei Shen is Lecturer in Mandarin Chinese in the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University. She received her B.A. in English from National Tsing-hua University and her M.A. in English from National Taiwan University. She taught English in both her alma maters before she went on to complete her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Shen has been conducting research on how the communicative act of "repair" is negotiated, failed or achieved in both English and Chinese conversations between native and non-native speakers and the interactional consequences of the launching and outcome of such repair. She has also been working on how various speech acts such as refusals and requests can be differentially realized in different societies and how such differences can lead to cross-cultural miscommunication and stereotyping. Based on her research along the lines of Conversation Analysis and Sociolinguistics, Dr. Shen has been working to integrate both linguistic elements and sociocultural parameters in her foreign language classrooms. Dr. Shen has translated and published several books in Chinese.

Masayoshi "Matt" Shibatani is Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics. He received both his B.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in Japanese linguistics, language typology, syntax and linguistic theory. In addition to Japanese, he has worked on Ainu, Korean, Cebuano (Philippine) and Balinese.  He is the author of Nihongo-no Bunseki, Taishukan-shoten (1978) and The Languages of Japan, Cambridge University Press (1990), and the editor of Approaches to Language Typology (1995) and Grammatical Constructions: Form and Meaning (1996), both from Oxford Clarendon Press, and of The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation, John Benjamins (2002). Professor Shibatani was a member of the Faculty of Letters at Kobe University for 23.5 years before joining the Rice faculty in January 2002. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA, University of Illinois, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Hawaii, La Trobe University (Melbourne), SOAS (London), and Keimyung University (Tague, Korea). He was also a Fellow at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University (1998-1999) and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California (2000-2001).

Richard J. Smith  is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and a Professor of History at Rice, as well as an adjunct faculty member in Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.  Deeply committed to secondary education, he is also Director of Asian and Global Outreach at Rice's Center for Education, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Asia Society's Asian Educational Resource Center, and an adviser to the National Commission on Asia in the Schools.  He is a member of many other professional organizations, including the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Advisory Board of Chinese Historians in the United States, and the Senior Advisory Board for the Association for Asian Studies journal, Education about Asia.  A specialist in modern Chinese history and traditional Chinese culture, he has won twelve teaching awards, including the Piper Professorship (1987), the George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit (1992), the Sarofim Distinguished Teaching Professorship (1994), the Nicholas Salgo Distinguished Teaching Award (1996), and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "Texas Professor of the Year" Award (1998).  Professor Smith's publications include about seventy articles or book chapters and seven books, including Mercenaries and Mandarins (1978): Traditional Chinese Culture (1978); Fortune-tellers and Philosophers (1991); Chinese Almanacs (1992); China's Cultural Heritage (1994); and Chinese Maps (1996), and Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press (2007). He has also co-edited or co-authored six volumes: Chinese Walled Cities (1979); Entering China's Service (1986); Robert Hart and China's Early Modernization (1991); Cosmology, Ontology, and Human Efficacy (1993); and H.B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China (1995) and The World of Almanacs: Day-Selection of the Chinese People (in Japanese; 1998).  He is currently working on two books--one on the "globalization" of the Yijing (I-ching or Classic of Changes) and the other on traditional Chinese ritual. For further information on Professor Smith's scholarly activities, see http://cohesion.rice.edu/humanities/hist/people.cfm?doc_id=2843

Diana L. Strassmann

Peiting Tsai

Stephen A. Tyler is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics. He received his Ph.D from Stanford University in 1964. Professor Tyler has done field work in South India among the Koya people and in North India. He is interested primarily in Dravidian speaking peoples of South India and continues to work on comparative Dravidian linguistics and Indian social organization. He teaches an undergraduate course on India and graduate seminars and tutorials on comparative Dravidian. In addition to a grammar of the Koya language, has also written a general text on India, titled India: An Anthropological Perspective. His most recent book is The Said and the Unsaid. Professor Tyler's research has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kerry Ward is Assistant Professor of World History at Rice University. Her geographical areas of specialization are African, Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean history. Her doctoral dissertation is on forced migration from the Netherlands East Indies to the Cape of Good Hope in the Dutch East India Company period c1650-1795. Her other research interests in the fields of South African and Indonesian history include the production of historical knowledge; issues of memory and history; the transformation of museums and the heritage industry; and Christianity and Islam.

Meng Yeh is a Lecturer in the Center for the Study of Languages and in Asian Studies.  She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993.  Before joining Rice, she was an Associate Professor of Chinese at Trinity University where she helped develop Chinese major program.  Her research interests are in theoretical linguistics, language pedagogy and films. Her recent papers on linguistics include ‘A Historical Analysis of Adverbs’ (1998) and ‘A Semantic Approach to the Aspectual Markers in Mandarin’ (1999).  She designed and co-authored a workbook of listening comprehension for the Chinese learners, published by Yale University Press (2000).  At Rice, she received two Brown Teaching Grants (2002, 2003) to develop online language learning materials.  She was awarded Jiede Research Grant for the project of ‘Exploring Chinatown: Integrating Language, Culture and Community,’ by the Chinese Language Teachers Association (2004).  Dr. Yeh received Sarofim Teaching Award, Rice University (2005).  She completed the project ‘Teaching Languages through Songs,’ through a grant from Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota (2006).  Currently she is working on ‘A Cultural Documentary on China: a Student Perspective,’ Booth-Ferris Grant (2006).