Presiders 

Heidi Bostic: U of New Hampshire, Durham 

Heidi Bostic is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire . A professor of French, her interests span eighteenth-century literature, contemporary feminist theory, narrative studies, and the role of the liberal arts. Her most recent publications include “The Business Case for Humanities Education” (with Ross Gittell), New Hampshire Business Review 2017; “To Address the Anthropocene, Engage the Liberal Arts” (with Meghan Howey), Anthropocene 2017; “Greimas and Gender: Mere Recipe or Real Meal?” Semiotica 2017; and “The Humanities Must Engage Global Grand Challenges” The Chronicle of Higher Education 2016. She is co-PI ona 3-year project, “New Hampshire Humanities Collaborative,” funded by the Mellon Foundation, and leads the Grand Challenges for the Liberal Arts Initiative at the University of New Hampshire.

Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow : Duke U 

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute at Shih Hsin University (Taipei, Taiwan). She is also Visiting Associate Professor of Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University. Her research and teaching include all manner of serialized narratives, press practices and publics, popular culture (anime, fandoms, media technologies), as well as the origins, formations, and articulations of Chinatowns around the world—also the subject of her forthcoming book, Chinatown States of Mind. With Carlos Rojas, she is the co-translator of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel Brothers (Pantheon, 2009) and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge, 2009).

In her non-academic days she has worked as a journalist, ‘foreign expert’, book designer, fudge chef, translator and interpreter, party photographer, film subtitler, and lowly PA on set for Warner Brothers and Beijing Film Studios. Find her at @chowleen on twitter or chowleen.tumblr.com chowleen.tumblr.com.

Speakers 

Mary Wildner-Bassett: U of Arizona 

Mary Wildner-Bassett earned her M.A. (with distinction) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her Ph.D. (Dr. Phil.) in 1983 at the Ruhr-University of Bochum in the Federal Republic of Germany. She joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1986 after teaching for two years in the Zentrales Fremdspracheninstitut at the University of Hamburg. Her publications include Improving Pragmatic Aspects of Learners’ Interlanguage (Tübingen, 1984), Zielpunkt Deutsch (N.Y., 1992) and many contributions to anthologies and journals on foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and computer- mediated second language communication. She is a Professor in the Department of German Studies, the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, and member of the Faculty, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. She served as Head of the Department of German Studies from 2004-2008, and as the Dean of the College of Humanities from 2008-2016. She teaches professional development, pedagogy, applied linguistics and L2 acquisition theory, and theories and practice of academic leadership on the graduate level; on the undergraduate level, she teaches German Studies language and culture courses and a new Health Humanities course. Her current research covers the areas of her teaching and explores the possibilities of experiential and contemplative learning contexts for language, culture and leadership.

Leta Hong Fincher : New York, NY 

Leta Hong Fincher is author of the critically acclaimed book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China  (Zed, 2014). Leta’s book was named one of the top 5 China books of 2014 by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile, one of the best foreign policy books in 2014 by FP Interrupted and one of the best Asian books of 2014 by Asia House. Leftover Women was also named on New Left Review’s list of favorite books to read for International Women’s Day in 2017 and 2016. Her forthcoming book is Betraying Big Brother: The Rise of China’s Feminist Resistance (Verso 2018).

Leta has written for the New York Times, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC, CNN and others. She is the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for television feature reporting. Fluent in Mandarin, Leta is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree with high honors from Harvard University. She has often been quoted by news organizations such as BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME and The Economist on the subject of women and feminism in China. Leta was a Lecturer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Patricia Hswe: Mellon Foundation 

Patricia Hswe is the Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which she joined in 2016. Previously, she was co-department head of Publishing and Curation Services at the Penn State University Libraries and a Council on Library and Information Resources postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She holds an MS in Library and Information Science from UIUC and a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. She is currently in the first year of a five-year term in the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. 

Sharmila Sen : Harvard U Press

Dr. Sharmila Sen is Executive Editor-at-Large at Harvard University Press where she has published over 250 books since 2006. She oversees a diverse portfolio of acquisitions from award-winning monographs to multi-million dollar digital products; from an innovative translation series that spans the linguistic world from Britain to the Bay of Bengal to cutting-edge comic books. Dr. Sen earned her A.B. from Harvard, and her Ph.D. from Yale in English literature. Prior to her appointment at the Press, she was a faculty member of the Harvard English department with specialization in postcolonial literature. She is the author of Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America, forthcoming from Penguin Books in Summer 2018.

Cheryl Wilson : Stevenson U 

Cheryl A. Wilson is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of English at Stevenson University in Maryland.  She is the author of Jane Austen and the Victorian Heroine (Palgrave 2017), Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (Pickering & Chatto 2012), and Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain  (Cambridge UP, 2009). In 2015, she published Shaping Work-Life Culture in Higher Education: A Guide for Academic Leaders  (Routledge) with Laura Koppes Bryan.