Dr. Shelley Rigger will be the keynote speaker at the 5th Annual Introduction to Asia Conference, scheduled at UTC on Thursday, Feb. 14 from 12:15-5 p.m. in the UTC University Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
Dr.
Rigger serves as Brown Professor of East Asian Politics and Chair of Political Science at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She has been a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. She
is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party.
Co-sponsors for the program are The Freeman Foundation and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia; Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Atlanta; UTC Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography; The UTC Asia Program; the UTC College of Arts and Sciences; the UTC School of Education and the UTC Walker Center for Teaching and Learning.
Kingsley Brock will also speak at the conference. He is the Assistant Commissioner of Business Development for the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. Brock manages recruitment and expansion activity for the department, and he was lead project manager on a number of significant projects.
Dr. Lucien Ellington, UC Foundation Professor of Education and Co-director of the Asia Program at UTC will moderate a student panel discussion and Dr. Craig Laing, Associate Professor of Geography at UTC will speak.
Dr. Ellington is editor of the Association for Asian Studies teaching journal, Education About Asia, and the organization’s pedagogical booklet series, Key Issues in Asian Studies. He has published four books on Japan and his interests extend to East Asian economic history, East Asian educational thought, and East Asia in world history.
Laing has spent time in China and Japan to pursue his research of Asian cultural landscapes.