The Asian Studies Program welcomed a number of visiting scholars to campus in 2011. Professor Pamela Kyle Crossley (Dartmouth College) came in April to discuss her book , The Wobbling Pivot: China since 1800, with students in Erik Esselstrom’s 
Modern China course who used that work as their main class textbook.
Professor Crossley with students
More recently, Asian Studies won a university funded Burack President’s Distinguished Lecture Award for Theodore Bestor, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology and Japanese Cultural Studies at Harvard University. Professor Bestor delivered a timely and provocative talk concerning the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan entitled, Disasters, Food, and Fishing: Japan’s Northeast in the Aftermath of 3/11.
Prof. Bestor delivering his Burack lecture 
Prof. Bestor also joined a small luncheon seminar with roughly a dozen Asian Studies majors and minors, who read selections from Bestor’s fascinating study of Tokyo’s largest fish market – TSUKIJI: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press, 2004). At the end of the luncheon, Professor Esselstrom surprised the students in attendance with free copies of Bestor’s book, which the author kindly signed for each of them.
Our Claire M. Lintilhac Lecture Series in Asian Studies also featured three guest speakers in the fall 2011 semester. Cultural Geographer Cary Karacas (CUNY-Staten Island) spoke in September on the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo in his presentation Dark Spaces on the Map: The Role of Cartography in the Destruction of Urban Japan during the Second World War.
See Japan air raids archive project co-developed by Cary Karacas http://www.japanairraids.org/
Cultural Geographer Cary Karacas speaks at UVM
In October, anthropologist and film maker Maris Gillette (Haverford College) screened her film Broken Pots, Broken Dreams and discussed her experiences as a documentary film maker in China with the audience. See Maris Gillette's Broken Pots, Broken Dreams http://www.haverford.edu/anthropology/brokenpots/film/film.html
Finally, in November, the widely published scholar of Nepalese Buddhism Sarah Levine (Harvard University) gave a talk entitled Buddhist Nuns: Coming into Their Own in the 21st Century.
In the spring of 2011 Asian Studies students organized a bake sale to raise funds for the Tsunami relief effort in Japan.
