Southeast Asian Archive Visiting Researcher Award
The UCI Libraries are pleased to offer an award of $500 to one individual to use the research collections in the Southeast Asian Archive, part of the UCI Libraries Special Collections and Archives. A generous gift from an anonymous donor has made this annual award possible.
The Southeast Asian Archive was established in 1987 to document the experiences of refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who came to the United States, and especially to California. The Archive’s strengths include materials relating to the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants in the United States (and to a lesser extent, worldwide), refugee camp and other experiences of the “boat people” and land refugees, the development and progress of new ethnic communities, and the culture and history of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. There is a special focus on materials pertaining to Southeast Asian Americans in Orange County and California.
The award is intended for a researcher who lives outside of Orange County and is not affiliated with UC Irvine. Eligible faculty, students, and independent researchers are encouraged to apply by the deadline of May 15, 2009. Research should be conducted between June 2009 and March 2010.
Application requirements: lib.uci.edu/libraries/collections/special/coll/seaa/award.html
Southeast Asian Archive: lib.uci.edu/libraries/collections/special/coll/seaa
Shanghai’s Two Faces: Cosmopolitanism and Glocalization
UCI History Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom opened the UCI Libraries’ spring exhibit in the Muriel Ansley Reynolds Exhibit Gallery on April 22, 2009. Professor Wasserstrom is an expert on Shanghai with more than 20 years of experience researching China. His latest book is Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments.
Originally a fishing and market town on the central east coast of China, Shanghai has grown in importance to become the “Pearl of the East” and a global commerce and finance center. During Shanghai’s more than 700 years of existence as a municipality, two boom eras gained the city its international identity as a hub between the East and the West. Through a visual display of UCI Libraries’ holdings, the exhibit portrays these two key time frames in Shanghai’s history: as a free treaty port from the late 19th century to the early 20th century and, more recently, as a dynamic metropolis with the transformation of Pudong from a rural area to an open economic development zone.
In light of research conducted by several UCI faculty members, including Abbas Ackbar in the Department of Comparative Literature and Jeffrey Wasserstrom in the Department of History, the exhibit also highlights two interesting phenomena arising out of these two eras: cosmopolitanism and glocalization. With sections covering places, people, events, commerce, popular culture, and literature, the exhibit demonstrates how Shanghai on the one hand embraces cohabitation of diverse nationality groups, while on the other hand undergoes constant local negotiation and appropriation to leverage global influence and local acceptance.
Shanghai’s Two Faces was curated by Ying Zhang, Research Librarian for Asian Studies and a former college teacher in Shanghai.
For more information about the exhibit, contact Julie Sully, Associate Director of Development (jsully@uci.edu or x44658).
Above: Exhibit invitation. Cover design: Sylvia Irving, UCI Libraries' Design Services.