Elizabeth Bryer

The Dr. David Chu Scholarship provided essential funding for research on Elizabeth’s dissertation in the Department of History: “Witnessing Colonial Trauma: Photography and the Philippine American War.”

Investigating the intersection of photography, psychology, and imperialism through a consideration of the content, context, and circulation of photographs of the Philippine American War, this dissertation analyzes the negotiation of colonial relations going beyond the increasingly well-studied Dean C. Worcester photographs. As a result of technological innovations making cameras cheaper, easier to use, and hand-held by the 1880s, colonial archives are full of images of the Philippines, predominantly without credit to a photographer, as Americans documented and reproduced the trauma of a colonial war for popular consumption. Many photographs of dead Filipino soldiers repeated throughout Philippine and American archives and accounts, summarizing the war in many published works of the time. This travel grant enabled research into Philippine perspectives and representations of the war for my dissertation, providing an invaluable contrast to depictions in American archives.

Thanks to the funding provided by the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies in 2013-14, Elizabeth presented some of this research at the American Studies Association annual meeting in October 2015 and at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in June 2016.

Jeremy Davison

Jeremy is a master’s student at the School of Public Policy and Governance and completing the Collaborative Master’s Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. He is interested in a wide range of academic disciplines – from statistics and philosophy to political science, sociology, anthropology, and history – and is currently researching Japan’s immigration policy and the Japanese public’s perception of immigrants. In his spare time, he likes to read a wide variety of literature and learn to cook dishes from around the world.

Thanks to his David Chu research grant, Jeremy was able to complete four weeks of fieldwork in Japan during the summer of 2015. The data that he collected, which he is currently analyzing with his supervisor, Dr. Ito Peng, hopes to improve our understanding of the attitudes of decision makers in rural Japan towards immigrants and immigration.

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Alice Niu

Alice’s (undergraduate student in Contemporary Asian Studies and Ethics, Society, and Law) work focused on Burma’s electoral process and political prisoners. Burma’s President made a pledge on July 14, 2013, to release all of Burma’s political prisoners by the end of the year. Mass releases of political prisoners followed and government announced in early 2015 that there were no political prisoners in Burma left to release. But today foreign and domestic critics assert that there are still dozens or hundreds of political prisoners in jail. Why the disparity? Alice’s research, funded by a Dr. David Chu Travel Grant in 2014-15, looked into who these prisoners are. A second report draws on three recent national surveys to give us an understanding of what Burmese voters expected in its landmark 2015 election.

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Johanna Pokorny

Johanna is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology in the socio-cultural stream. Her research interests lie in the anthropology of science and science and technology studies. Her dissertation focuses on current changes in neuroscience research, and how these recast North American cultural notions of the self and the body. As part of her research and with the generous support of the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia-Pacific Studies in 2013-14, Johanna extended her fieldwork, following the collaborations of the neuroscientists she studied with to Asia, specifically Taiwan and China. This portion of her research allows her to consider the ways in which researchers collaborate transnationally and how science translates in different cultural contexts.

Aaron Peters

Aaron Peters is a fourth-year PhD student with the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His project charts and analyzes the historical relationship between Japan and South Asia from 1915 to 1952. Through the use of the language of entanglement, he hopes to situate the exchanges and encounters which occurred between various groups in Japan, India, and the South Asian diaspora in East and Southeast Asia in this period within the context of global imperialism. In particular, his research hopes to illustrate how a variety of individuals and institutions in Japan and the South Asian diaspora mobilized each other for their own purposes, yet were entangled within the Japanese imperial project in ways that elude neatly defined categories of either collaborationism or opportunism. He also hopes to bring attention to and evaluate the significance of alternative alliances and narrations of community pursued by groups and individuals in Japan, India, and the South Asian diaspora in their attempts to escape the perils of imperial entanglements. Through studying the relationship between Japan and South Asia, he hopes to intervene in current discussions regarding nationalism and transnationalism, empire and comparative colonialism, diaspora studies, and memory.

Jessica Soedirgo

Jessica Soedirgo is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. Her dissertation research focuses on the persecution of religious minorities in Indonesia and the variation in the forms and targets of discrimination across time and space. Empirically, the dissertation asks why violence and discrimination against Indonesia’s small Ahmadiyah and Shi’a minority suddenly increased after decades of invisibility. Theoretically, it makes a contribution to the larger scholarship on intra-religious conflict and state regulation of religion.

Jessica has been the recipient of three Dr. David Chu Scholarships in Asia-Pacific studies (travel). The first travel award was granted in 2011 for language training in the city of Jogjakarta, where she spent every weekday from 8am-3pm learning Bahasa Indonesia at Realia Language and Culture Centre. The second award generously funded 11 months of research in 2014 in the provinces of North Sumatra, West Java, East Java and in the capital city of Jakarta. The third award funded an additional two months of fieldwork in 2015 to fill existing gaps. In these two rounds of dissertation fieldwork, over 100 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a variety of participants, including members of minority groups; mobilizers and participants of anti-minority violence and protests; and politicians from both Islamic and secular parties. As seen, without the support provided by the Chu family, it would have been immensely difficult to carry out research with any breadth or depth.

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Gary Wang

Gary Wang’s dissertation research in Fine Art History examines new concepts of art, the visual aspects of physical culture, and their effects on gender, sexuality and class in early-twentieth-century China. His work analyzes how new images of ‘the body beautiful’ intersected with the neologism meishu (fine art), and how these impacted pre-existing ideals and attitudes toward mei (beauty), especially with regard to constructs of femininity, masculinity and related notions of respectability. In four interconnected case studies, he focuses on two motifs that emerged during this period – the ‘Modern Girl’ and ‘Muscleman’ – as depicted in a range of media.

While his research concerns the historical emergence and implications of these two motifs, he had not anticipated the prevalence of their present-day incarnations in the Chinese cities he visited for research after being awarded a Dr. David Chu Travel Grant in 2014-15.. The ‘old Shanghai’ Modern Girl image was printed on packaging for products from cosmetics to food products, a muscular male model appeared in a series of tongue-in-cheek advertisements for fresh-meat products, and the April 2016 editions of That’s Shanghai, That’s Beijing and That’s PRD (Pearl River Delta) featured a cover story on the body-building scene in China today.

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