Dr. Jonathan Abel is a professor of comparative literature and Japanese at Penn State. This distinguished scholar of Japanese media, film, and literature will be speaking at the Kentucky Foreign Languages Conference on April 18th, co-sponsored by the University of Kentucky Global Asias Program.
Dr. Jessamyn Abel is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and History at Penn State. Her lecture presents her book Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train as a part of the 2025 History Workshop in the Department of History. The 2024 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize winner explores 1960s Japan through the window of the bullet train, showing how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use to perform cultural and sociological functions.
Students spend most of their time outside of the classroom. For teaching to be relevant, it must address the joys, needs, anxieties, fascinations, and relationships that fill students’ lives. How can we teach our subjects while also filling the brief time we have in the company of students with lessons that will do work in their lives—changing a perspective, influencing a choice, or opening up a new way of relating to others?
Join us as featured guest speaker and educator Luke Hein shares experiences from his time teaching in the mountains of Southwest China, villages in Indonesia, and Alabama prisons. Brought to you by UK's A&S Global Asias Program, history department, and CELT, this session will explore some “classrooms” far away from the traditional classroom, examine problems and opportunities these teaching contexts present, and mine these experiences for things attendees might bring home to their own teaching contexts. Lunch will be provided so please register in advance.
More about our featured speaker:
Luke Hein is an experiential educator and writer. He has been involved in China Studies since 2005 when he spent his senior year of high school in Beijing. In 2007, he worked for a Chinese tour company in Yunnan, and in 2008 he conducted six months of field research on the effects of the Olympic Games on migrant worker income strategies as part of a year-long undergraduate research project. In 2011 he graduated from Auburn University with a BA in English and a minor in Asian Studies. Luke has worked as a career educator since 2014, mainly with U.S. high school students studying in China and Indonesia. From 2021 to 2024 Luke worked with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project as an administrative assistant and educator. His essay on this experience appears in the Made in China Journal, and Luke plans to continue working with these ideas as a graduate student starting in 2025.
In this talk, experiential educator and writer Luke Hein will draw from his time teaching a general interest class about China in three Alabama State correctional facilities to illuminate hidden connections between distant places and to argue that U.S. prisons represent an underserved but fertile site for China Studies.
Bio:
Luke Hein is an experiential educator and writer. He has been involved in China Studies since 2005 when he spent his senior year of high school in Beijing. In 2007, he worked for a Chinese tour company in Yunnan, and in 2008 he conducted six months of field research on the effects of the Olympic Games on migrant worker income strategies as part of a year-long undergraduate research project. In 2011 he graduated from Auburn University with a BA in English and a minor in Asian Studies. Luke has worked as a career educator since 2014, mainly with U.S. high school students studying in China and Indonesia. From 2021 to 2024 Luke worked with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project as an administrative assistant and educator. His essay on this experience appears in the Made in China Journal, and Luke plans to continue working with these ideas as a graduate student starting in 2025.
Cynthia Wu, Professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, will join the Committee on Social Theory on 9/20 to deliver this Fall’s Distinguished Speaker talk. Professor Wu’s talk is entitled “East Asian Specters in the Twenty-First-Century Wars on Terror.” Please join us in the James F. Hardymon Theater (David Marksbury Building 101) at 1:00pm!
Co-sponsored by the University of Kentucky Global Asias Program.
