Trevor Menders is a 2018 graduate of Columbia’s East Asian Languages and Cultures Department and a former student worker at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He recently completed a year as a Fulbright Research Fellow in affiliation with Tokyo University of the Arts. Beginning in September he will be a Toshizo Watanabe Fellow at the Yokohama Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies.
I happened into the East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) department at Columbia by accident. I came to Columbia to study chemistry. You can study chemistry anywhere, but I chose Columbia because of its dance program—I had grown up training to be a professional dancer and I didn’t want to let that go in college, though I never intended to major in dance. I placed into the chemistry department’s accelerated general chemistry course, a victory at the time, but about two weeks in I dropped the class and drifted without a departmental affiliation for a semester. I took the semester to dig deep and suss out what I was truly interested in pursuing.
I came to two conclusions. The first was that I wanted to keep the arts involved in my professional and academic life, and the second was that I wanted to study something which my California public high school education had not covered. I began to suspect I might enjoy studying East Asia: images of ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan had survived in the back of my head since I first saw them around age eight at the San Diego Museum of Art, and reading Life and Death in Shanghai by Chang Nien on my own in 9th or 10th grade had previously opened my eyes to the fact that “Asia” existed as an area with a rich history far removed from anything I would ever encounter in school. I decided to take the plunge in the second semester of my sophomore year, enrolling in both Japanese language and the department’s introductory Japanese civilization course. And, with that, I was hooked. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
I don’t think there’s any one thing I can isolate specifically as having piqued my interest or caused me to focus on the fields I did (Japan and art history). I wanted to take everything the department had to offer. I took courses across disciplines: from art history to anthropology to literature to religion—focused on Japan, China, Korea, and beyond. In a sense, this is what piqued my interest: one of the benefits of being surrounded by faculty with a variety of specialties is that it allows students to learn with breadth as well as depth. Because I was able to take courses cutting across time periods, regions, and topics, I made new connections for myself basically every day: about the evolution of Buddhism as it migrated across the Asian continent, how porcelain production techniques were transmitted across the Japan Sea—and so forth. This ever-expanding network of knowledge kept me one hundred percent engaged for my entire time in the department.
While working with WEAI in 2015, I got to help produce a series of video interviews with visiting scholars, restructure the Expanding East Asian Studies (ExEAS) website (http://
www.exeas.org/about.html), and more. I met tons of inspiring people while working at WEAI and am forever grateful for the opportunity that Ross Yelsey (former WEAI publications and public relations coordinator) offered me. Many of the scholars who work in association with WEAI focus on modern East, Southeast, and Central Asian history, but my own coursework in undergrad kept me firmly rooted in the 10th through the 13th centuries with only occasional forays into the 17th and 18th—certainly nothing as recent as the 20th century. Working at WEAI, though, exposed me to modern history and changed my thinking about the dichotomy of modern vs. premodern. I wanted to bridge it, collapse the barriers that we’ve built up between the “old” and “new” versions of sociopolitical formation in the region. The result was that I became increasingly interested in how historic objects have traversed this divide—in how to tell the stories of old objects in new times and their paths through history, rather than the stories of when they were originally created. The inspiration I took from people working on things so different from my own interests left an indelible impression on how I think about art and history and deeply influences how I structure my projects.
I just finished a year as a Fulbright Research Fellow in affiliation with Tokyo University of the Arts. The year was interesting. I had spent about eight months total living in Japan before taking the fellowship through a combination of study abroad and shortterm independent research grants. I published my first academic article “Nascent Tradition: Tomimoto Kenkichi and the Turn to Contemporary Ceramics in Vessel Explored/Vessel Transformed: Tomimoto Kenkichi and his Enduring Legacy,” gave my first invited talk at a Fulbright conference in Taipei, met many brilliant scholars, curated and designed my first solo exhibition and accompanying catalog (featuring the works of fellow Columbia graduate and current Tokyo University of the Arts MFA student Cho Hyunjoo! We also collaborated with Columbia Global Thought MA alum Chris Lin) and received translation commissions from organizations like the Kyoto National Museum, the Japan Tourism Association, and even the Agency for Cultural Affairs. More importantly, of course, I learned more about my research topic— the effects of American scientist and collector Edward S. Morse on systems of knowledge and historiography of “traditional” ceramics in late 20th and early 21st century Japan—than I ever could have hoped for.
My Fulbright term ended in July and I’ll be starting as a Toshizo Watanabe Fellow at the Yokohama Inter-University Center (IUC) for Japanese Language Studies in September. IUC will allow me to work on the problem areas I identified in my language ability over the past year. I’m also glad to put a little distance between myself and the Tokyo city center; Yokohama is much more relaxed. After that, I have no idea where I’ll end up! I think I’d like to come back to the US for now, whether that means working or entering a graduate program. I’m sending out a variety of applications and I’m excited to see what comes back. I’m shifting my research emphasis to the intersection of performing arts and visual arts in East Asian history with a focus on Japanese liturgical dance and issues of audience across media. I think it’ll open up some exciting horizons.
This article originally appeared in the August issue of the WEAI 70 Years newsletter.
