Hope College History Department
Dr. Lauren Janes
Professor Janes was thrilled to return to Paris, co-leading the Art, History, and Global Citizenship in Paris May Term. It was wonderful to return to favorite restaurants, markets, and neighborhood spots and see them thriving. The students were able to visit museums, go on walking tours, and take in awesome cultural events. Dr. Janes was especially thrilled to tour the newly-renovated Musée Carnavalet, full of artifacts of the history of Paris.
Another highlight this year was her visit to Monet’s gardens at Giverny. Pictured left is Dr. Janes with Dr. Heidi Kraus, Hope College Associate Provost and Art and Art History Professor.
The Art, History, and Global Citizenship in Paris May Term will travel again in May 2023!
Applications are due Oct 29 at travel.hope.edu.
Dr. Gloria Tseng
This was a full summer, even though I did not attend the two summer conferences that I regularly attended for many years before the pandemic. The Andrew Walls Centre for the Study of African and Asian Christianity at Liverpool-Hope University did not hold a conference this year, and I did not attend this year’s Yale-Edinburgh Group Meeting. In the last three years, two towering figures in the field world Christianity passed away—Lamin Sanneh in January 2019 and Andrew Walls in August 2021. Even though their deaths were not the reason for which I skipped the Y-E Meeting this year, I was deeply aware that the passing of these two co-founders of the Yale-Edinburgh Group and animating spirits of its annual meetings signified the end of an era in the field.
I remained home, first working on a new project, the preparation of a grant application, which, if successful, would provide funding for starting a documentary on the conversion of the Atayal, one of more than a dozen indigenous tribes of Taiwan, to Christianity. Then I finished a paper on the twentieth-century Chinese writer Ba Jin, “Love, Resurrection, and Revolution: The Anguished Cries of a May Fourth Intellectual,” for inclusion in a conference volume. I first presented the paper at a conference organized by the University of Manchester and Hong Kong Baptist University in January of this year, “Translation, Literature, and Publishing in Chinese Christianities.”
On Thursday, September 22, I will present a version of this paper at one of the public talks of the Holland Museum (https://hollandmuseum.org/event/biblical-imagery-in-unlikely-places-christianity-and-early-twentieth-century-chinese-literature/?event_date=2022-09-22).
It was also a summer of gardening and hospitality. A friend came and stayed with me for a month from the last week of June to the last week of July, and the Atayal pastor with whom Prof. Choonghee Han (Communication Department) and I are collaborating on the documentary project visited for a few days before Independence Day.
I finally made it out to Colorado for ten days in mid-August, in time before the start of the new academic year. It was well-needed; I hiked, climbed, and came back better for it!
