Report from the Road: AAS Meeting, 2008

Authors

Date of this Version

4-14-2008

Document Type

Article

Citation

April 14, 2008 in The China Beat http://www.thechinabeat.org/

Comments

Copyright April 14, 2008. Used by permission.

Abstract

As our regular readers will have noticed, China Beat has been unusually quiet of late. This is mainly because we were out of range of the internet two weeks ago to attend the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (and in recovery from the conference hubbub the following week). The AAS is primarily composed of scholars but is also open to those in other fields who study and think about Asia; it has about 7,000 members, with a few thousand in attendance at this conference.

We took advantage of the largest gathering of China Beat contributors in one place since our founding to have breakfast together (where we also got feedback on the blog and brainstormed with a friend of the blog in the world of publishing) before everyone dashed off to hear panels, meet with publishers, and catch up with colleagues from other institutions. Paul Katz, Tim Weston, Nicole Barnes, Jeff Wasserstrom, and Kate Merkel-Hess were in attendance. As most of us had not met the others before (Jeff was the link between us all), the breakfast gathering was an affirmation of the fundamentally virtual nature of this endeavor.