Contact: Maridith Geuder
Nearly 1 million yen are translating into more library resources for students and faculty at Mississippi State University.
More than $8,000--or nearly 1 million yen--in library materials is being granted to Mitchell Memorial Library by the New York-based Japan Foundation, said Dean of Libraries Frances Coleman.
The award is made under the foundation's Library Support Program and will provide nearly 150 titles about Japanese history, culture, society and religion. "We anticipate delivery by the fall," she said.
The grant will allow the library to expand its holdings related to Pacific Asia, an area in which the university is enhancing its academic offerings, she noted.
History department head Charles Lowery said the collaboration between the library and his department will yield benefits for scholars in a number of academic areas.
"Our department is establishing new courses in Asian history and has for the first time hired a professor who is an Asian specialist," he noted. Other Asian specialists are in business, political science, foreign languages, sociology and anthropology, and philosophy and religion, he said.
Christoph Giebel, who is developing the new Asian studies program in the history department, plans courses in modern Chinese history, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and Japan and Korea.
Giebel, who earned a Ph.D. at Cornell University, recently received the Lauriston Sharp Prize from the university's Southeast Asia Program for his dissertation on Vietnamese communism. "At Mississippi State, I will teach four courses in sequence, focusing on the modern period from the late 18th century to the present," he explained.
The courses draw on a variety of materials, ranging from original historical sources to fiction and movies. His recent course on Vietnam introduced students to the original text of Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence, as well as to a novel written by a Vietnamese soldier, among a variety of sources.
"The Japan Foundation Award is a prestigious honor," he noted. "It will greatly enhance our course offerings in Japanese studies. I believe Mississippi State is poised to become a regional center in Japanese studies."
Mitchell Memorial Library, meanwhile, continues to seek collaborations with other academic areas to enhance resources available to students and faculty members, libraries dean Coleman said. "We encourage other campus departments to call on us," she said.