2002-2003 and 2006-2008 D Dayton 达恬地
D Dayton was originally a student in the Friends World Program having attended the Middle East Center in Jerusalem, Israel in 1999-2000 and the China Center in 2000-2001. He graduated with a concentration in Arts/Literature in autumn 2001 and in the summer of 2002 became the China Center administrator. Working with the Visiting Center Director Bill Powell, D managed student affairs and organized field trips for the 2002-2003 academic year. In 2003 he moved to Sydney, Australia to study a Master of Arts in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. But in the fall of 2006, D returned to the China Center as the Center Coordinator where he advised students and taught courses on Hangzhou’s cultural development, modern Chinese literature and film, and Chinese ethnic minorities. After completing two more years with the China Center, D has finally moved back to the US with his wife Zhou Yi to pursue a doctorate degree at the University of California.
Contact Information:
D Dayton
Email
2003-2006 Justin O’Jack
Justin began as a volunteer an Academic Coordinator with us in September, 2003, and over the course of his first year he and the other faculty completely remodeled the China Center facilities and restructured its curriculum. Beginning in fall, 2004, Justin assumed the full-time position of resident Academic Director and Faculty Adviser for seniors and students interested in Chinese religious studies. Justin taught an Area Studies course on religion in Chinese culture and society in the fall and a seminar on religion in Tibetan culture and society in the spring.
Justin, himself a product of both an experiential and conventional academic education, is firmly committed to the pursuit of critical cultural knowledge through the complementary approaches of textual and experiential learning in an immersive environment. A longtime student of the University of California since 1988, Justin received his B.A. in the Department of History from the Santa Cruz campus in 1993, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum laude, but it was his junior year abroad in New Delhi, India, that changed his life and his philosophy of education. His senior research focused on Buddhist religious geography and pilgrimage traditions, an interest that again led him abroad on an academic exchange program, this time in China. After a two-year extended stay in southwest and eastern China, Justin resumed his graduate studies at the University of California in 1998, this time at the Santa Barbara campus, where he earned his M.A. from the Department of Religious Studies and continues to pursue his Ph.D. Justin’s dissertation research is an historical and geographic analysis of the imperial patronage of Chinese Buddhist monasteries that resulted in the creation of four national pilgrimage centers in the Ming dynasty.
In fall, 2006, Justin assumed the position of Resident Director of CIEE in Shanghai and Chief Legal Representative of CIEE in China.
Contact information:
Justin O’Jack
2002-2003 William F. Powell
Professor William Fredrick Powell served as the Academic Director, together with David Dayton, the Administrative Director, for one year while on sabbatical from his regular position as Associate Professor in the departments of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Powell was trained at the University of California, Berkeley, in the philological methods of Buddhist studies, which was the basis for his translation and study of the prominent 9th century Chan (Zen) monk, Dong shan. This will be followed by a study of Dong shan’s disciple, Cao shan. His present work focuses on the relationship between Chinese Buddhism, pilgrimage and sacred space, particularly mountains. This work places emphasis on modes of spatial perception rooted in religious understandings and the role of those modes of perception in economic, social, and ecological systems. This work has led to an involvement in digital simulations of sacred geography and topography, both as a means of scholarly analysis and as a pedagogic device for teaching about the relatively complex notions that emerge from such analysis at the undergraduate level.
Contact Information:
William Powell
Department of Religious Studies, Room 3063 or
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Room 2224
Humanities and Social Sciences Building, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130
East Asian Studies Phone: (805) 893-3501
Religious Studies Phone: (805) 893-4455
East Asian Languages Studies Email or
Religious Studies Email
East Asian Studies Website or
Religious Studies Website
2001-2002 Kristen Parris
Professor Kristen Parris served as Academic Co-director together with Julia Renfo, the Administrative Director, in Fall 2001 and as the Academic Director in Spring 2002. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Western Washington University, where she teaches comparative and Chinese Politics.
Contact Information:
Office: Arntzen Hall 422
Western Washington University, 516 High Street, Bellingham, WA 98225-9082
Phone: (360) 650-4873
Email
Website
1998-2001 Julia Renfo
Julia Renfo, now Julia Carnine, served as the Academic Director in Fall 1998 and as the Administrative Director together with Wen-jie Qin, the Academic Director, in Spring 2000 and again as the Administrative Director with Kristen Parris in Fall 2001.
Julia Renfo graduated from Lewis and Clark College with a double major in French and Cultural Anthropology and earned her Master’s degree in Education and Technology from Long Island University with a culminating project based on cross-cultural exchange between American and Chinese students facilitated by Internet technologies. She moved to Toulouse, France, directly from Hangzhou in the Spring of 2002 and since then has worked as the Academic Director for School for International Training Study Abroad program in France.
Contact Information:
Email
Website
1998-2000 Wen-jie Qin
Wen-jie Qin served as the Academic Director together with Julia Renfo, the Administrative Director, from July 1998 to August 2000. Originally form Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Wen-jie Qin graduated from Beijing University in 1989 with a B.A. in philosophy. She then went to the United States to complete her Ph.D. in Religion and Film at Harvard University, which resulted in the dissertation, The Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China: Women Reconstruct Buddhism on Mt. Emei (2000) and a documentary film about Pure Land Buddhist funerary practices on Mt. Emei called, To the Land of Bliss (released in 2001). Dr. Qin has produced several other films about China, including Woman Being (1997), a critical examination of changing concepts of beauty and sexuality in modern China, The Sprouts of Capitalism in China (1997), the story of the businessman Yang Daquan in Pengzhou, Sichuan, and We Are Not Beggars (1997), which depicts the life of child street performers in contemporary China. Dr. Qin is currently living in Amsterdam and filming a television documentary about Dutch immigration issues. She plans to make a film about life in a Daoist monastery on Mt. Qingcheng, Sichuan, in the near future.
Contact Information:
Email
1996-1998 Jessica Tudos
Jessica Tudos served as the Academic Director for two years from fall 1996 to spring 1998, working together with Miao Li, Program Coordinator, from 1996 to 1997.
Jessica Tudos was born in Toronto and received her undergraduate degree at Arizona State University. She completed her Maters degree in Educational Administration at McGill University and has been working in post secondary education ever since. She is currently the Communications and Outreach Coordinator at the Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation, which administers leadership awards to outstanding young Canadians. Jessica has also worked as an international recruiter at Trent University, a recreational director at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts, and as a resident director onboard Semester at Sea in various experiential teaching capacities. Alongside her educational career, Jessica has also dedicated herself to seeking out creative explorations in dance, fine arts, circus and photography. She has her own small business, KIKA Creative Enterprises, which is dedicated to creating innovative and collaborative projects that build creative communities. She currently lives in her hometown of Toronto.
Contact Information:
Address: 17 Atlantic Avenue #4, Toronto, M6K3E7, Canada
Phone: (416) 530-5853
Email
1993-1994 Felix R. Esquerdo
Felix R. Esquerdo, who graduated from Friends World College in 1985, administered the China Center for one academic year. Now Lama Padma Karma, he co-founded the Center for Dzogchen Studies in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1994, where he continues to teach Tibetan Buddhism. Born in 1952 and raised in the Virgin Islands, he moved to China in 1985. He was given the titles of Vajra Master and Rinpoche in 1992 by Tulku Serdo Rinpoche with the authorization to teach under the auspices of the Nyingma and Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism and, more specifically, within the Longchen Nyingthig Lineage of the Kalsang Monastery.
Lama Padma Karma at the Center for Dzogchen Studies, August 2002.
Contact Information
Center for Dzogchen Studies
17 Tour Avenue
New Haven, CT 06515
Phone: 203 387-9992
Email
Website
1989-1993 Maria Jaschok
Maria Jaschok served as the Academic Director of the China Center when the program first moved to Hangzhou in 1989, and she first established academic ties with Zhejiang University together with the Program Coordinator, Miao Li. Dr. Jaschok received her Ph.D. from SOAS and is a Research Scholar at the Institute for Chinese Studies, a founding member of the Women’s Initiative on International Affairs in Asia, and co-founder of the Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network. She is also currently the Director of the International Gender Studies Centre, which is a part of Queen Elizabeth House in the Department of International Development at the University of
Maria Jaschok in Copenhagen, October 2004
Oxford. Dr. Jaschok’s currently researches religious conversion and gender in modernizing Asian societies, and the materiality of memory construction. Some of her representative publications on China include: Chinese Women Organizing (2000), The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (2000), The Communist Party, Allah and Women’s Liberation: The Place of Religious Life in the History of Chinese Women (2000), Concubinage: China (1999), Chinese Educational Reforms and Feminist Praxis: On Ideals, Process, and Paradigm (1998), On the Construction of Desire and Anxiety: Contestations Over Female Nature and Identity in China’s Modern Market Society (1995).
Contact Information:
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women
International Development Centre
University of Oxford
21 Street Giles, Oxford 0X1 3LA, United Kingdom
Phone: 1865-273-644
Fax: 1865-273-607
Email or Email
Website
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women Email
Back to Faculty & Staff