Vassar College Chinese and Japanese Department

10/15/2026

Share your talent at Culture Day! All are welcome to sign up for a solo or group performance. See the link below to sign up

Sign-up form: https://forms.gle/9MdroNKFz3pyMdoY6
Sign-up deadline: November 2, 11:59pm

10/13/2026

Professor Roberta Strippoli will take us on a journey across Japanese history, exploring the interplay of literature, gender, and cultural heritage by tracing a famous episode from The Tale of the Heike, Japan’s most celebrated medieval epic, and its many afterlives.

Date: Oct. 27, 2026, 5:30–7:00 p.m.
Location: Taylor Hall, Room 203

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Asians Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Chinese and Japanese Department, the Medieval & Renaissance Studies Program, and the Women, Feminist, and Q***r Studies Program.

10/08/2026

Great to see our students' work on display at the Loeb! If you haven't already, go check out this exhibition corner in the main gallery, on view through January 11, 2027.

Museums can sometimes feel just beyond reach. But what happens when we bring the collection into the classroom and use it to bring a campus community closer together?

At its heart is a simple idea: that the Loeb’s collections can become not only objects of study, but meeting places for students, faculty, librarians, and curators. Go to https://library.vassar.edu/blog/Opening-the-Museum to read about “Opening the Museum: A Collaboration Across the Chinese and Japanese Department, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and Vassar College Libraries” and visit the Loeb to see student selected works now on view through January 11, 2027.
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Image: Adachi Ginkō (Japanese, 1853–1902), “Number 6: Lady Sayo, Grieving her Husband’s Departure, Weeps Until she Dies,” 1885, woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper, Gift of Justine Lewis Keidel, class of 1937, 1991.35.6

09/29/2026

Happening today! Everyone is welcome to attend. We hope to see you in Taylor Hall 203 at 5:00 pm. Full program here:
https://www.vassar.edu/news/events/epistolary-intimacies-poetics-pedagogy-and-politics-premodern-letter-writing

09/23/2026

Exciting news! Our very own Prof. Tommasi and his Ford Scholar, Hodaka Maeda ’28, were just featured in Vassar News! This past summer, they worked together on a project titled “Self-Archiving in 16th-Century Japan: A Comparative Study of Warrior Diaries.” Check out this article to learn more about their project and the Ford Scholars initiative.

Article: https://www.vassar.edu/news/vassar-ford-scholars-program-nourishes-rich-student-faculty-collaboration

09/22/2026

Introducing our 2026-2027 academic interns!
They will be a resource throughout the academic year and please do not hesitate to reach out to them or attend their office hours 😊

09/22/2026

Vassar College, in association with the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS), will host the 2026 NYCAS, focusing on the theme of Asia and Environment across Time and Space! To register and learn more please follow this link: https://pages.vassar.edu/nycas2026/.

04/13/2026

We are pleased to announce that Vassar will host NYCAS, the regional conference of the Association for Asian Studies this October!🎉

The Call for Papers is open through the end of May, and we warmly encourage submissions, whether individual papers or organized panels: https://pages.vassar.edu/nycas2026/

With the Hudson Valley at peak foliage, this will be an excellent opportunity to visit campus and explore the surrounding area. We look forward to welcoming you in this fall!🍁

The conference is co-organized by our own Prof. Tsuchiya-Dollase👏

Vassar College, in association with the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS), will host the 2026 NYCAS focusing on the theme Asia and Environment across Time and Space. Environment as physical surroundings reminds us of our primordial and corporeal embeddedness in nature. Environment as a me...

04/08/2026

Come join the department today for a talk by Prof. Jeffrey Niedermaier (Brown University). The lecture will be held in the Sanders Classroom Auditorium at 5:00 pm. We hope to see you there!

04/01/2026

Congratulations to Professor Natalie Doan '10 on her new book Civil War Samurai: The 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi Onojirō in Antebellum America! Professor Doan graduated with a double major in Japanese and English from Vassar and is an assistant professor of History at the University of Tennessee. We are so proud of our alums! Check out the link to see the trailer for her book!

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