East Asia: Traditions, Trends and Transformations

Joseph Cabosky is an assistant professor at the School of Media and Journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. As a creative/professional–track faculty member, his work focuses on better understanding micro and niche populations, and how those understandings should disrupt and innovate the fields of PR and advertising. He has a Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill and a J.D. from Michigan State University College of Law.

Sara Bush Castro is a teaching assistant professor in the curriculum on peace, war and defense at UNC-Chapel Hill specializing in global security and intelligence history, U.S.-China relations and Chinese foreign policy. She also serves as assistant director of the TISS Community Center of Academic Excellence. She holds a doctorate in history from UNC-Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she specialized in security studies and Asia. Before coming to North Carolina, she served as an analyst for the US government in Washington DC and as a program assistant at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a non-governmental organization in New York City.

Yang Cheng received her Ph.D. from the Missouri School of Journalism, which is one of the oldest formal journalism schools in the world. She also graduated with the outstanding academic award from the national recognized Crosby M.B.A. program. Yang teaches research methods, the introduction of public relation, crisis communication and global communication in the U.S. and Hong Kong. She has published more than 50 journal articles, book chapters and conference papers. She has also received many awards and honors from global institutions and international conferences and her research has been funded by many prestigious global institutions.

Wu Fei is a native of Beijing and a current Nashville resident. She is a classically trained composer, master of the guzheng – the 21-string Chinese zither – and a vocalist. She plays in the guzheng’s vernacular, a musical language which is at least 2,000 years old, and mixes Western classical and Chinese traditions with a contemporary, idiosyncratic sound. Her early music education was at the China Conservatory of Music, but she did her Master’s at Mills College and later immersed herself in the New York downtown improvisation scene. Wu Fei composes for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan and orchestra; her commissions range from a composition for Percussions Claviers de Lyon that premiered in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing to live performances in Paris and Tokyo for luxury brand Hermès. Fei has also collaborated with many artists of different disciplines and genres and has taken her guzheng and music around the world.Together as an entirely unique banjo-guzheng duo and bonded by their bi-cultural sisterhood, Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei sing and perform original compositions inspired by weaving together Appalachian and Chinese folk songs. To support the mission behind their music, they created an educational initiative called The Ripple Effect, 连心乐, which aims to bridge hearts and minds through cross-cultural collaboration, starting with the US and China, and the universal language of music.

Kaiser Kuo is host of the Sinica Podcast, the leading English-language podcast on current affairs in China, and editor-at-large of SupChina.com. He repatriated to the U.S. in 2016 after living in China for over 20 years. He served as director of International Communications for Baidu, China’s leading search engine, from 2010 to 2016. Prior to that he was a reporter focusing on technology and media in China, and is perhaps best known as one of the founders of China’s first and most successful heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty. He lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and two children.

Levi McLaughlin is assistant professor at the department of philosophy and religious studies at North Carolina State University. His work deals primarily with religion and politics in contemporary Japan. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University after previous study at the University of Tokyo, and he holds a B.A. and M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. He is co-author and co-editor of Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in Japan and co-editor of the special issue “Salvage and Salvation: Religion and Disaster Relief in Asia.” His book Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation is forthcoming in late 2018.

Ruby Slippers Dance Club is a Chinese cultural dance group that practices and performs both classical and modern Chinese dances. They are comprised of dancers ages 8 through 18 who practice new dances every year with a mission to promote the understanding and appreciation of Chinese cultures in the Triangle area of North Carolina. The Rain Maidens dance is a traditional dance from the Dai ethnic group. It tells the story of young girls dancing with umbrellas as they celebrate the rainy season.

Michael Tsin received his M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and teaches history and global studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China, and co-author of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from 1000 CE to the Present. His current research focuses on the question of “Chineseness” in the twentieth century and beyond..

Triangle Taiko, formed in 2002, is part of the Nippon Club of the Triangle. Taiko is a form of Japanese percussion music. There are nearly 200 taiko ensembles in North America, and Triangle Taiko is one of only a handful of taiko groups in the Southeastern United States. Triangle Taiko is an all-volunteer group dedicated to the exploration and performance of Taiko. Their motto is “sharing the spirit of Taiko with the world.”

Abigail Washburn is a Grammy award–winning vocalist, songwriter and clawhammer banjo player based in Nashville. A Mandarin Chinese speaker, Abigail regularly toured China for 20 years, including a month¬-long tour of China’s Silk Road supported by grants from the US Embassy, Beijing. Abigail’s musical projects range from her string band, Uncle Earl, to her bilingual releases Song of the Traveling Daughter and City of Refuge, to the mind-bending “chamber roots” sound of the Sparrow Quartet, to Afterquake, her fundraiser CD for Sichuan earthquake victims. Her most recent record with her husband, Béla Fleck, won a 2016 Grammy for Best Folk Album. Abigail is a TED Fellow and gave a TED talk titled “Building US-China Relations . . . by Banjo” where she spoke about shifting from a future in law to a pursuit of musical bridging. In March of 2013, she was commissioned by New York Voices and the NY Public Theater to write and debut a theatrical work, Post-American Girl, which drew from her then 17-year relationship with China and addressed themes of expanding identity, cultural relativism, pilgrimage and the universal appeal of music. Abigail is also the first US-China Fellow at Vanderbilt University.Together as an entirely unique banjo-guzheng duo and bonded by their bi-cultural sisterhood, Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei sing and perform original compositions inspired by weaving together Appalachian and Chinese folk songs. To support the mission behind their music, they created an educational initiative called The Ripple Effect, 连心乐, which aims to bridge hearts and minds through cross-cultural collaboration, starting with the US and China, and the universal language of music.