APSI scholars press ahead at 2026 SEC-AAS annual meeting

Members of the APSI community gave new meaning to the word “represent” at the 2026 annual meeting of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. 

Eleven current APSI students, including ten East Asian Studies MA students and one graduate certificate student, were invited to present their research. They were joined by Dr. Xingming Wang, APSI's postdoctoral associate, and SeungHyeon Pyo (MA ’23), now a PhD student at the University of Hawaiʻi–Mānoa.

Regional academic conferences such as this one offer a valuable opportunity for students and faculty to interact with one another in a more intimate environment with a less frenetic schedule. Additionally, participants have the chance to encounter perspectives on related topics from different academic disciplines and methodological approaches, advancing the interdisciplinary exchange that is an inherent part of the field of Asian Studies.

The opportunity to talk about my research with a panel of peers was highly educational and inspiring. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to what other people were working on, seeing different methodological approaches and perspectives as they passionately discussed their research. Overall, my experiences at SEC-AAS have motivated me to continue studying and have reinforced my desire to pursue this research.”
—Steele Engelmann

APSI strongly supports student (and faculty) attendance at academic conferences and has devoted particular attention in recent years to this series, since the SEC-AAS is uniquely positioned to advance dialogues in Asian Studies in the southeastern United States. 

All of the presenters had been looking forward to attending this event, hosted by Georgia Tech, until an unexpected intervention by Winter Storm Fern made travel to Atlanta all but impossible. The region experiences major winter weather events once per decade, on average; defying the odds, Fern arrived at least nine years ahead of schedule.

Fortunately, everyone was resilient and resourceful. The conference theme, “Asian Studies in the Digital Age, Old and New,” became unintentionally poetic as the hosts quickly pivoted to an online format, allowing the conference to proceed as originally scheduled, albeit over Zoom. Panelists and observers engaged one another in lively Q&A following the presentations in each session, frequently noting the high caliber of innovative work that is being done by these dedicated scholars.

I was especially struck by the breadth and intellectual range of my peers’ research, from the study of current queer spaces on Chinese social media to new interpretations of archeological objects in the Han dynasty, which once again demonstrated that Asia offers far more than its geopolitical framing in Western discourse. Instead, it is a rich archive of social histories, lived experiences, and cultural complexity that continues to demand careful, human-centered scholarship.”
—Karen Shi

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Even for returning attendees, there was something new to this year’s experience, beyond the rapid transition to a fully virtual engagement. Presenters had a chance to participate in conversations beyond the classroom, and many of the panels featured a healthy mix of established and emerging scholars. 

Panelists displayed a creative mix of methodological approaches and applications of new technology to persistent questions across the humanities and applied social sciences. This extended interchange is partly why APSI has been working to institutionalize student attendance at the SEC-AAS annual meetings. 

One of the persistent challenges of academic presentations, particularly in a multidisciplinary context, is finding the appropriate balance of information sharing. Yet, the very process of practicing and delivering the talk can also provide essential insights:

One difficulty I encountered was the challenge of presenting a project that I am already very familiar with to an audience that is not. I also found that presenting differs from writing in many ways. Interestingly, one of our panel members and I shared a similar academic background. This resonance made me more aware of a shared methodological concern we encountered in the field, namely, how to approach the diversity and complexity of “texts” in online settings, and what close reading might mean once it is detached from its context in literary criticism. While I do not yet have a definitive answer to this question, it is one that I intend to continue reflecting on in my ongoing research.”
—Jiaer Liu

Congratulations to the winners!

Despite the disappointment stemming from the lack of in-person networking and social encounters, everyone from APSI made the most of the opportunity. APSI-affiliated scholars also received numerous awards, revealed during the conference’s annual business meeting.

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Daniel Xuyang Zhang, a second-year East Asian Studies MA student, received the prize for best graduate paper for his article “Shaping Minds Through Play.” In this paper, he uses a curated museum exhibition framework to demonstrate how the traditional Japanese board game, sugoroku, functioned as a tool for nationalist indoctrination between 1894 and 1945. By analyzing game mechanics, aesthetics, and performative play through the theoretical lenses of Mosse, Arendt, and Butler, Zhang argues that these games sanitized war to mold children into imperial subjects. The paper’s five-hall structure illustrates how repetitive gameplay and scripted victories mirrored state propaganda, ultimately transforming militaristic education into a banal, everyday activity.

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APSI’s postdoctoral associate, Dr. Xingming Wang, received the Best Article prize for “Toward a Crematory Epiphany: Dark Ecological Responses to Two Post-socialist Crises in Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003)” published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. The article begins with a close reading of the closing scene of Li Yang's 2003 film, Blind Shaft, tracing its significance across multiple levels of interpretation, from the visual adaptation of a contemporary novella, to a critique of a contemporary Chinese distortions of the family structure, to an ecocritical symptom of the China's exploitative relationship with nature and labor. Wang demonstrates how Li's film intertwines the crises of interpersonal relations and an ideology of extractivism, and offers a reading of the film that gets at the philosophical heart of the idea community.

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, a core APSI faculty member and the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke, received the 2026 Book Prize for The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising, Design, Nation and Empire in Modern Japan, published by Duke University Press (2025). A pioneering study of modern Japanese commercial art and empire building, The Fine Art of Persuasion is meticulously researched and crisply written and contributes significantly to the understanding of corporate branding and national identity from the early 1900s to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Its archival depth and conceptual clarity make the study an important resource for scholars and students alike, offering fresh insights into the fraught relationship between commerce, design, and politics during a period of rapid social and political transformation. Professor Weisenfeld previously won the Book Prize in 2024.

Presentations by first-year MA in East Asian Studies students:

• Yaqing Zhuang—“Seeing the Ancient Shu Road: A Visual Psychological Approach to Aesthetic Perception in Landscape Painting”
• ZiFu Xu—“Reinventing Japanese Literary Figures in Modern Media: An Analysis of the Manga Bungō Stray Dogs”
• Iris Wu—“Repressible Voices or Not: Feminism and the State in Modern China”
• Steele Engelmann—“Houses Built for Gods: Articulations of Urban Shrines in Kyoto”
• Shuang Wu—“Rethinking Chinese Religiosity: Deities, Belief, and the Paradox of Happiness” (Wu also served as the session chair)
• Karen Shi—“From Feudal Remnant to Modern Security: The Persistence of Bride Price in China”
• Xiaomei Wu—“Imagining Agriculture in Nanyō and the Formation of the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere: The Writings of Itō Chōji, 伊藤兆司 1938–1944” 

Presentations by second-year MA in East Asian Studies students:

• Siyu Zhang—“Ritual after Resettlement: Construction of Collective Memory and Symbolic Space in a Resettled Village in North China”
• Lilia Yan—“Reconstructing Heterosexual Romance and Female Masculinity: Cosplay Commission in Chinese Otome Game Fandom”
• Daniel Xuyang Zhang—“The Summon of False Freedom: Chinese Gay Wanghuang on Twitter and the Neoliberal Trap”
• Jiaer Liu—“Loving, Selling, Hiding: Neoliberal Negotiation of Insecurity among Lala Couple Influencers on Xiaohongshu”

Presentation by East Asian Studies graduate certificate student:

• Yixuan Jiang—“Yellow Ornament as Another Necessary Other”

Presentation by APSI postdoctoral associate:

• Xingming Wang—“Intermedia Engagement: The Ethics of Writing in Ping Lu’s The River Darkens”

Presentation by APSI alumni:

• “Lines of Sound, Lines of Nation: Ueda Kazutoshi, the Neogrammarians, and the Transnational Grammar of Modernity”—SeungHyeon Pyo, University of Hawaii at Manoa (MA ’23)