Contributors
Rangan Chakravarty has worked in corporate and development communication for nearly 25 years. Since completing a PhD in Media Studies at Sussex University, Rangan has worked as a media producer and a communications consultant, conducting communications workshops in a number of countries including Egypt, Yemen and the Netherlands. He is also an editorial consultant for the Bengali daily, Anandabazar Patrika.
Sudipto Chatterjee is currently an Assistant Professor of Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught as an Assistant Professor of Drama at Tufts University. With parallel interests in theatre, film and music, Sudipto has been the Artistic Director of Epic Actors' Workshop and Choir in New York. In 1997, he made Free To Sing?, a feature-length documentary on Suman Chatterjee, which has been screened at various international venues. Many of his articles have appeared in international anthologies and theatre journals. Sudipto is also the author of 14 plays and translations in Bengali and English, most of which have been performed in the USA and India. He is currently working on two books on Indian theatre.
Allen Chun is Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. His current research interests include historical anthropology, postcolonial theory, Chinese societies and the cultural sociology of the state. Allen has published articles in Theory, Culture & Society, Dialectical Anthropology, Journal of Historical Sociology, History & Anthropology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Culture & Policy, boundary 2, Current Anthropology, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, Toung Pao and Late Imperial China. He has recently published Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of ‘Land’ in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 2000).
Michael Hayes teaches in the Human Rights and Social Development programme at Mahidol University, Thailand. He researches issue of media, human rights and development in South East Asia.
David T. Hill is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia, where he is also a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre. He has published in both English and Indonesian on the print media, literature and cultural politics in Indonesia, including The Press in New Order Indonesia (Nedlands, W.A.: University of Western Australia in association with Asia Research Centre on Social, Political and Economic Change, Murdoch University, 1994) and, most recently, as co-author, with Krishna Sen, of Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000).
John Hutnyk is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and teaches in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College. His books on music include Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry (London: Pluto Press, 2000) and Dis- Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (co-edited with Sanjay and Ashwani Sharma) (London: Zed Books, 1996). He has edited special sections on ‘Music and Politics’ in the journals Postcolonial Studies (with Virinder Kalra, 1 (3), 1998) and Theory, Culture and Society (with Sanjay Sharma, 17 (3), 2000). His next book will be called Bad Marxism: Cultural Studies and Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
Zachar Laskewicz successfully defended his PhD in Theatre and Drama Studies at the University of Ghent in 2002. He has also studied ethnomusicology, experimental composition, multimedia and linguistics in Australia and Belgium. He has lectured at universities in Holland, Finland, Italy and Mexico, and currently lives in Taipei. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in theatre, drama and performance at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei; he also teaches at the graduate institute for theatre studies at the Taipei National University Arts and the Kaohsiung National University. In addition to his academic work, he performs and composes experimental music-theatre, highlights of which include directing one of his productions in Belgium and performing solo at the festival of musical action in Lithuania. Articles on his theoretical work have been published in journals and conference proceedings all around the world and in 2003 his first book, Music as Episteme, Text, Sign & Tool, was published by Saru Press. He continues to work in his capacity as composer, theatre director, lecturer and theoretician.
Masashi Ogawa teaches in the Department of Japanese Studies, University of Hong Kong. His research interests include issues of identity, popular culture and tourism. He is currently conducting research on Japanese popular music in Hong Kong and Japanese individual long-term travellers.
Ned Rossiter is Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University. He is co-editor of Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001). Ned is also a co-facilitator of fibreculture, a network of critical internet research and culture in Australasia (www.fibreculture.org).
Krishna Sen is Professor of Asian Media, Curtin University of Technology, in Perth, Australia. She has written extensively on media and on gender politics in Indonesia. Her most recent book, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, is coauthored with David Hill.
Brian Shoesmith is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at Edith Cowan University and Head of the Centre for Asian Communication, Media and Cultural Studies. He has published articles in Quarterly Review of Film and Video Studies, Media Asia and Continuum on Asian media and film. He is currently finishing a book (with Hart Cohen) on satellite communication in Asia and is also writing a book on Indian film in the Cambridge National Cinemas series. Current research interests are regionalism and cable television in China and Indian popular film. He is a member of the Council of the Asian Mass Communication Information Centre in Singapore.
Carolyn S. Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the Melbourne Institute of Asian Studies, University of Melbourne. She has degrees in social and cultural anthropology from Harvard University and Columbia University. She has published articles in American Asian Review, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, and Japanese Studies. Since the publication of her book On the Margins of Japanese Society (Routledge, 1997), Stevens has been focusing her research inquiries on Japanese fan organisations.
David Stokes teaches in the Department of Language and International Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. In 2002 he completed his PhD thesis, ‘Localising Rock: Music, Media and Culture in Late Twentieth Century China’, in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at Melbourne University. He has published in Asian Studies Review and Antithesis. His main interests are reproduction, bawdy sea shanties and Abbotsford Invalid Stout.
Jeremy E. Taylor obtained his PhD in history from the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University, in 2003. He is interested in the cultural history of Taiwan and other East Asian societies, and his work has been published in scholarly journals such as East Asian History and Social History.
Christine R. Yano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Her book, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song, was published in 2002 by Harvard University Asia Center (Harvard University Press). Her current research projects include a study of the Japanese postwar diva Misora Hibari, transnational flows of Japanese goods such as Sanrio's Hello Kitty, and a Japanese American beauty pageant in Hawaii.