Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
Message from the Director
Chuanren Ke
Welcome to the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) at the University of Iowa. The Center was established in 1986 with a generous endowment gift from E & M Charities and the Stanley family of Muscatine, Iowa. CAPS' mission is to promote teaching, research, and outreach related to East and Southeast Asia. CAPS has received major gifts from the Hua Hsia Foundation, Taipei, and the Korea Foundation, Seoul, in support of endowed professorships in Chinese and Korean studies. In January, 2002, CAPS was awarded a four-year grant from the Freeman Foundation of Stowe, Vermont to expand East Asian faculty and staff, fund outreach, study abroad programs, and promote undergraduate education on Asia.
Within its teaching mission, CAPS strives to support new faculty appointments and encourages curricular and programmatic innovations designed to strengthen the educational programs of the University. To further its research mission, the Center seeks and offers support for faculty research projects designed to generate new knowledge about the institutions and cultures of East Asia, and facilitates student and faculty exchanges with universities and institutes in East and Southeast Asia. In its service mission, the Center sponsors campus programs and outreach activities that increase awareness and appreciation of Asian societies and cultures, disseminates information about East Asia to interested persons within and outside the University, and maintains ties with an active network of scholarly and civil groups around the state.
Chuanren Ke - Director & Professor of Chinese
Misson Statement
In recognition of the steadily increasing interdependence of the nations of the world, and in anticipation of a new Century of the Pacific - a century in which the world's political and economic center of gravity is expected to shift toward the countries along the Asian rim of the Pacific - The University of Iowa has established the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS). Like the University of which it is a part, the Center has teaching, research, and service missions.
Within its teaching mission, the Center encourages curricular and programmatic innovations designed to strengthen the educational programs of the University.
As a research mission, the Center seeks and offers support for research projects designed to generate new knowledge about institutions and cultures of East Asia, and tries to create reservoirs of expertise on that region of the world.
As its service mission, the Center disseminates information about the nations of East Asia - their cultures, laws, economic opportunities, societies, and governments - to interested persons within and outside the University, and maintains ties with an active network of interested scholars around the state.
History
The Center was established in 1986 with the help of a generous endowment gift from E & M Charities and the Stanley family of Muscatine, Iowa, and with the initiative of then University of Iowa President James Freedman. Ever since, the Center has enjoyed strong support from the successive presidents and administrations, and different programs at the University of Iowa.
In its first stage of development, the Center concentrated on strengthening the infrastructure by creating additional faculty and staff positions, by helping various units of the University recruit outstanding faculty, by increasing library funds for Asian collection, and by consolidating and promoting international programs already in existence.
The Center then launched a new initiative, whose major goal was to create and maintain a preeminent interdisciplinary social science program. The focus on social science was designed to take advantage of unusual strengths of the existing faculty and to emphasize Iowa's unique combination of emphases in order to complement established programs on East Asia at other universities. The most important component of the initiative was to increase the number of distinguished chairs from one to three by seeking additional funds from East Asian sources.
The Present and Future
We secured funds from the Korea Foundation and recruited a distinguished scholar in the field of anthropology for Korean studies. We have secured similar funds to recruit a Chinese studies chair with a call for nominations to be announced soon. CAPS provided initial financial support to get the Confucius Institute established at the University of Iowa in 2006. Each semester, the Center hosts several scholars from East Asia, who are drawn by Iowa's reputation to carry out their research projects with their own financial support.
The University's current emphasis on global challenges puts the Center in a position to launch another stage of development. With funding from Freeman Foundation, we were able to recruit three tenure-track faculty in different fields (China politics, China religion, and modern Japanese literature). Currently we are recruiting a tenure-track position atf assistant professor level for Chinese culture and institutions.