Russian Studies /
Arts and Beliefs
Advising:

Susan Walcott, Ph.D. (Indiana University) A Professor in UNCG’s Department of Geography, Dr. Walcott's scholarly interests focus on regional economic development based on high technology industrial clusters such as the life science industry and urban growth coalitions.  Her work on GIS as a research methodology has been applied in articles on water quality in Shanghai and development in Bhutan.  Regions that she has studied include China, India, Bhutan, the American Midwest, San Diego,
and Atlanta.  

She recently published a book that examines science parks in China, and her articles have appeared in journals such as The Professional Geographer, Asian Geographer, and the Journal of Cultural Geography.  A graduate of Swarthmore (BA) and Rutgers (MA), she learned Mandarin Chinese in the Critical Languages Program, lived three years in Taiwan, and speaks both dialects fluently.

Roberto Campo, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania) is a Professor of French, Director of International and Global Studies, and Director of French Graduate Study.  His specialties are 16th century French literature, poetic and aesthetic theory of antiquity and the Renaissance, laughter theory, and orientalism. Dr. Campo is a published author and recipient of UNCG’s University Alumni Teaching Excellence Award.

Dr. Campo’s international experience has been substantial, both in the context of his work as a professor of French and in his capacity as Director of IGS, a position to which he was appointed in fall 2006 after serving seventeen years on the INS Program Advisory Committee.  His ability to administer the Project is further attested by his achievements since assuming directorship of IGS, his ongoing work in assessing IGS within WEAVE, 18 years of language program assessments as a faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages, and his leadership roles in developing the ACTFL standards for cultural proficiency and in peer outreach through the NC-American Association of Teachers of French. 

James Anderson, Ph.D. (University of Washington) is Associate Professor in the Department of History at UNCG. An historian specializing in pre-modern China and Vietnam, Anderson joined the UNCG faculty in 1999.  A graduate of Harvard College, he holds Master's and PhD degrees from the University of Washington. 

During the 2006-07 academic year Anderson was a Fulbright fellow at the Institute of History in the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing (PRC).  From February to August 2004, he was a Luce
Fellow in the John W. Kluge Center for International Studies at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC).   Anderson's current book is titled The Rebel Den of Nung Tri Cao: Loyalty and Identity Along the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2007).  He reads and speaks Mandarin and Cantonese with near-native proficiency.

Gavin Douglas, Ph.D. (University of Washington) joined the UNCG School of Music in 2002 and teaches courses on World Music, Asian Music, and American vernacular music. His research interests include nationalism, politics, globalization and cross-cultural aesthetics.

Dr. Douglas’ ongoing fieldwork in Burma (Myanmar) focuses on the state patronage of traditional music and the role it plays in the political processes of the ruling dictatorship. He has presented his research throughout the U.S. and Canada and in Great Britain, Sweden, Singapore, and Japan.  His writings can
be found in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The World of Music, The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, The Chinese Journal of Ritual, and Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century and elsewhere.

Gregory Grieve, Ph.D. (University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies specializing in South Asian and Himalayan religions. The core of his scholarly work, published in a variety of American and international journals, is the ethnographic study of lived religion in Nepal, with a focus on what he calls "prosaic religion"—those everyday occurrences that are concerned with material worldly affairs.  

Drawing upon a broad range of theory and methodologies, Dr. Grieve uses such everyday accounts to reflect upon the nature of religion. He argues that to accurately address the phenomenon of religion, one needs to focus upon the common physical dimension of day-to-day practice.

Ruth King, Ph.D. (University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor, Department of Information
Systems & Operations Management for the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNCG.  She
was on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before arriving at UNCG in 2005.  
Her research interests range from the social impact of emerging technologies, IT outsourcing offshore strategies, and IT human capital management to computer-mediated collaborative work.  She has published in premium journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. Because of her background and early education in Taiwan, she has been actively involved in building programs to
facilitate the education exchange among US colleges and universities in China and Taiwan.

Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies) is Assistant Professor and Director of Chinese Studies at UNCG’s Dept of German, Russian, Japanese & Chinese. Dr. Liu explores into various aspects of language use in higher educational settings, including target language speech acts realization, metaphorizing, second language pragmatic competence development, negative pragmatic transfer, and pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication.  He teaches Modern China, Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Alexandra Schultheis, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literatures and Theory in the English Department.  She draws on her interdisciplinary background in English, history, public policy, and gender studies to teach a wide range of courses on postcolonial and global literatures, women’s literature, literature and film, and human rights and global literary production. 

Dr. Schultheis won the 2006-07 College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence Award and two course development grants for new offerings in international human rights in literature and film (one specifically focused on Asia).  Her monograph, Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family, examines the metaphor of the nation-as-family in a variety of postcolonial texts.  Her current research project is on “Transnational Human Rights Narratives of Contemporary Tibet.”

Stephen Sills, Ph.D. (Arizona State University) is Assistant Professor in UNCG’s Sociology Department, teaching in the Global Social Problems concentration. His scholarship includes research on the feminization of labor migration, transnational identity, and social networks. Specifically he has been investigating transnationalism, transnational ties, and female migration among Filipino migrant workers in Taiwan.

Dr. Sills’ research agenda includes current projects focusing on immigrant access to safe and affordable housing, access to social and health services, and the protection of labor rights for migrants in the United States and elsewhere.

Chiaki Takagi, Ph.D. is the Director of Japanese Studies in the Department of German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese Studies at UNCG.  She has been teaching at UNCG since Spring 2000 and has designed courses including “Modern Japan” and “Women in Japanese Film and Literature.”  She is also the organizer of Japanese Film Series and J-Day as well as the faculty advisor to J-Club and Aikido Club.