Dear Friends / Gucuse of the Manchu Studies Group,
With the beginning of a new academic year here in the US, it is our pleasure to send to you this brief update with our warmest greetings wherever you are. As many of you know, this past spring we had the honor to be elected the new Board of the Manchu Studies Group. Here we would like to acknowledge again with gratitude Max Oidtmann, Yulian Wu, and Devin Fitzgerald for their service in the past three years and for their generous help during the transition period. We would like to take this opportunity to extend our warm welcome to the new members of the MSG community, and update you with a few important items on our agenda this year.
While we continue to abide by the original statement of our mission to “advance and promote informed scholarship on all aspects of Manjuristics” and to “provide a greater sense of community” for scholars working in various disciplines pertaining to Manchu studies, the academic and professional apparatus around us has been rapidly changing since 2012, when MSG was first founded. As a result, the specific means by which we seek to accomplish the mission above must also adapt to the most pressing needs of our time. Among those, let me bring your attention to the following:
- This summer, AAS has announced that it would no longer be “offering the option to list session sponsorship on proposal submissions.” In addition, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the specific timing and format of the next AAS annual conference is currently subject to change. As a result, we no longer can use a sponsored panel to feature the latest research, but will do our best to feature Manchu Studies scholarship in the final program once it is announced. In addition, we are committed to hosting a meeting-in-conjunction in Spring 2021, most likely in online format, featuring our members who would like to share their thoughts on “Doing Manchu Studies in the 2020s,” to brainstorm on the significance of Manchu learning in today’s academia and beyond. A more detailed call-for-participation will be forthcoming later this year.
- The excruciating demands on faculty and graduate students’ time, which has no doubt been exacerbated by the pandemic and ongoing job insecurity, has made it no longer realistic to sustain a regular online reading group for all MSG members. We’re interested in helping members organize and promote online Manchu reading groups based on their level of experience with the language, time zone, and/or topics or genres of interest. We encourage you to organize your own reading group(s) and let us help you promote it to invite broader and more flexible participation.
- The lag of US Higher-ed institutions in creating credited Manchu instruction (and thus paying faculty for teaching it) has created unnecessary barriers in obtaining initial access to Manchu literacy. While we continue to call for the formalization and integration of Manchu in regular undergraduate education and graduate training, this summer we experimented with two online introductory classes taught respectively by Devin Fitzgerald and David Porter, charging a small hourly fee directly from participants. We are encouraged by the enthusiasm of many to enroll in these classes, and see it as a more flexible way to offer affordable, if informal, Manchu instruction without the rigidity of institutional for-credit requirements. We invite those interested in teaching and learning Manchu to check out the material generously shared by Mark Elliott and David Porter on our website, and stay tuned for similar announcements in Summer 2021.
- Thanks to the editorial stewardship by Pär Cassel and Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Saksaha: a Journal of Manchu Studies is going strong as a peer-reviewed journal with the benefit of being open-access (and hence no longer restricted to MSG membership). Here we reiterate the editors’ call for submissions – research articles, short research notes, and book reviews.
- Last but not least, we are excited to continue the maintenance and renewal of our website as a communal space and research portal. We will create a subscription service by which you can receive monthly newsletters with the latest updates, and we invite you to check out the new content added this summer, with the “Meet a Member profiles,” the Manchu fonts/input system (thanks to Ben Yang who did all the technical work), the teaching/learning resources, and more to come. We hope to capture the expanding constituency of our group by featuring work done by graduate students, early-career researchers/people not on the tenure track, scholars at non-R1 institutions, scholars working outside North America, etc. Please write to us at [email protected] if you would like to participate in the “Meet the Member” profiles or have an idea for blog contribution.
We are here to help you connect with others over a shared commitment to Manchu studies as a vital means to diversify and enrich our scholarly disciplines. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions. Users of social network platforms will also be able to interact with us on Facebook and Twitter. Again, we look forward to serving you in the next three years and wish you a very healthy and successful year ahead!
Sincerely yours,
He Bian, Jaymin Kim, and David Porter
September 2020