Steven Ramey

Steven Ramey, Professor

315-A Manly Hall | (205) 348-4218 | steven.ramey@ua.edu

Website

Dr. Ramey’s primary research focuses on the contemporary formation of religious practices in contexts of migration, particularly analyzing the contestations surrounding subgroups within a religion. He is continuing extensive research with people from the region of Sindh who assert a clear Hindu identification but whose practices, which incorporate Hindu deities and texts, the Guru Granth Sahib of Sikhism, and Sufi Muslim saints, lead others to question the Hindu identification of the Sindhis. He is also researching South Asian religions in the southeastern United States, especially focusing on Indo-Caribbean Hindus and Sindhi Hindus in this context. He uses the case of the Sindhi Hindus, Indo-Caribbean Hindus, and other subgroups to analyze the ways religious boundaries are constructed and contested in both academic studies and contemporary societies and the impact of those processes on minority groups. He participates in an international collaborative, Culture on the Edge, and is a regular contributor to its blog.

Michael Altman

Michael Altman, Assistant Professor

205 Manly Hall | (205) 348-7223 | maltman@ua.edu

Website

As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Altman research focuses on American responses to representations of Asia in the nineteenth century, particularly emphasizing Asian religions. His current research examines cultural constructions of Hinduism in 19th-century America. Beginning with American interest in India in the early republic and ending with the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893, Dr. Altman argues that Hinduism had an impact on American culture earlier than scholars have previously thought and that the ways Americans imagined the Hindu other shaped concepts of what counted as religion in America. Dr. Altman is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Imagining Hindus: India and Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

Koji Arizumi

Koji Arizumi, Instructor of Japanese and Japanese Literature

200 BB Comer | (205) 348-5059 | karizumi@ml.as.ua.edu

Website

The Director of the Critical Languages Center, Dr. Arizumi teaches in the Japanese program.  His areas of interest include Japanese language, literature, and film.

Nikhil Bilwakesh

Nikhil Bilwakesh, Associate Professor

210 Rowand-Johnson Hall | (205) 348-2523 | nbilwakesh@ua.edu

Website

As an Associate Professor, Dr. Bilwakesh holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His academic interests include nineteenth-century American literature, Asian American literature, film studies, and the essay. He is currently working on a book about pre-Civil War American cosmopolitanism.

portrait of Mina Kim

Mina Kim, Assistant Professor

205-A Garland Hall | (205) 348-5967 | mkim75@ua.edu

Website

As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Mina Kim focuses on Korean art, East Asian and global modern and contemporary art, including multimedia and digital art, transdisciplinarity in art and science, cross- or intercommunication between art and science and art, society, politics and religion from the past and the present in East Asia and the world. She is the author of Jung Yeondoo’s Media Art: Quantum Deformation through Coincidence of the Real and the Virtual. She has published three articles related to the Chinese modern artist, Pan Tianshou (1897-1971), in Orientations, Journal of Museum Studies, American Journal of Chinese Studies. Kim is researching Korean experimental art in the 1960s and 1970s: performance, participatory and social art in Korea, multimedia and digital art in the global world, and transdisciplinarity in art and science, especially mathematics and physics

Dr. Liu

Di Luo, Assistant Professor

206 ten Hoor Hall | (205) 348-1857 | dluo10@ua.edu

Website

Dr. Luo is a specialist in the history of modern China with particular focus on the period from the twentieth century. Her research focuses on the relations among state, society, and individual, and the interplay between ideology and practices. She is currently working on a manuscript about literacy in the first half of twentieth-century China.

Cathy Pagani

Cathy Pagani, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, Assistant to the Provost

102 Rose Administration Building | (205) 348-0400 | cathy@ua.edu

Dr. Pagani came to The University of Alabama from Canada in 1993. She is a prolific scholar of Asian Art whose research can be found in over 35 articles and has been the topic of several publications. She is the author of Eastern Magnificence and European Ingenuity: Clocks of Late Imperial ChinaChinese Opium Boxes and The First Emperor of China co-authored with R.W.L. Guisso. In conjunction with her scholarship Dr. Pagani is a widely sought-after lecturer who has presented her research on countless occasions at nationally and internationally respected colleges, universities and professional organizations.

Sonya Pritzker

Sonya Pritzker, Assistant Professor

15 ten Hoor Hall | (205) 348-0091 | sepritzker@ua.edu

Website

Dr. Pritzker is a medical and linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on the management and expression of emotion in China, the development of Chinese medical psychology in the U.S. and China, and the translation of Chinese medicine in the U.S. Her book, Living Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine, was published in 2014. Prior to her doctoral studies in anthropology, she completed her masters training in Chinese medicine and has been a licensed acupuncturist and practitioner of Chinese herbal medicine since 2002. She is involved in several national and international organizations focused on the development of integrative medicine in the U.S. and beyond.

photo of Dr. Sung

Doris Sung, Assistant Professor

301 Garland Hall | (205) 348-1428 | dhsung@ua.edu

Dr. Sung joined the Art and Art History Department at UA in 2018. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art of East Asia, cultural interactions between Asia and Europe, and gender and visual culture. Prior to coming to the Capstone, she was an Assistant Curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. She was also an adjunct professor of Chinese and East Asian art at York University (Toronto), and the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is currently working on a manuscript on the art practices of three generations of Chinese women who were active between the 1900s and the 1970s. Its conceptual focus is on the reassessment of female talent and virtue, a moralized dichotomy that had been used to frame women’s social practices and cultural production for centuries in China.