From Archives to Inquiry: New Horizons in East Asian Studies
Peter Zhou (retired director of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, UC Berkeley)
In this talk, organized by APSI's Archival Research for East Asian Studies Research Cluster, Dr. Peter Zhou will explore how archival development can lead to new academic inquiries and open up new horizons in East Asian studies.
This event is part of a series focused on East Asian Studies Archival Research. Members of the Triangle academic community are welcome to attend; registration is kindly requested (via link, below).
About the talk:
In recent years, newly developed archival collections in East Asian studies have opened exciting avenues for research and discovery in the historical, cultural, and social development of China and the broader East Asian region. In this talk, I will introduce three significant archives housed at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of UC Berkeley: the Paul Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies 方保罗中国电影研究资料特藏, the largest archival collection on Chinese film studies in North America; the Yuen Ren Chao Papers 赵元任档案, the personal archive of an influential scholar widely regarded as the “father of modern Chinese linguistics”; and the James Soong Archive 宋楚瑜档案, one of our most recent acquisitions, comprising more than 100,000 items documenting the democratization process in modern Taiwan. I will highlight key features of these collections and present selected artifacts that illustrate their scholarly significance.
Through this discussion, I will address both the content and the methodology of conducting meaningful research in Chinese studies. In particular, I will demonstrate how the development of new archival collections can catalyze emerging fields of inquiry, how primary sources can be used to formulate significant research questions, and how scholars can move from archival annotation and interpretation toward the production of original scholarly publications. Even though the featured materials are mostly for Chinese studies, I will briefly relate to our efforts in and plans for building archival materials for Japanese and Korean studies as well.
About the speaker:
Peter Zhou recently retired as the assistant university librarian and director of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he held positions as head of the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh and as East Asian librarian at the University of Iowa. He has had adjunct professorships at Pitt, Iowa, and at Wuhan University. He has written and spoken widely on East Asian librarianship and Chinese historical texts. His recent publications include an edited volume entitled Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America, 1868–2008 (Association for Asian Studies, 2010).
Peter Zhou has a PhD (linguistics) and an MS (library and information science) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a master’s (English) from Wuhan University.