I was recently asked to update the “Adam Cathcart” entry for the “Faculty Research Page” at Pacific Lutheran University. I kept one sentence from the old entry and then tallied up other recent activities in the research side of the “Adam Cathcart” ledger. It was judged to be too long and was consequently cut down. I think that ultimately I will need a separate web page for my musical scholarship and performance, which are in fact intimately related to everything else and which do constitute a form of research.
In any case, the following update is, in fact, what I am doing and have been up to of late, beyond the inspiring teaching and spirited committee work which is also part of the professorial professional pattern:
Assistant Professor Adam Cathcart continues his field work and archival research in Beijing, Berlin, and the Chinese-North Korean borderlands. In December 2010, Korean Studies published his research article “Nationalism and Ethnic Identity in the Sino-Korean Border Region of Yanbian, 1945-1950.” His recent scholarship on Korean War propaganda was published in Chinese Walls in Time and Space (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Popular Music and Society (London, 2010). On the subject of North Korea’s relationship with China, Cathcart’s blog contains several hundred relevant and original essays written since 2009. In the area of Sino-Japanese relations, Cathcart’s article “To Serve Revenge for the Dead: Chinese Communist Responses to Japanese War Crimes, 1949-1956” won China Quarterly’s Gordon White Prize for the best article of 2009. The China Quarterly article is part of a larger project about the impact of the American occupation of Japan on the growth of Chinese nationalism in the 1950s based on research in the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive in Beijing. Along with his fieldwork to various anti-Japanese museums in the autumn of 2010, Cathcart performed cello recitals at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music and Southwest Nationalities University. In July 2011, he will appear in Chengdu for performances and master classes, and will give a lecture at the American Consulate in that city on the subject of Chinese-Western cultural diplomacy. In April 2011, he gave the German premiere of Gao Ping’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in Berlin and also continued his research in Nazi Party archives. He is presently constructing manuscripts relating to Nanking Massacre films, Japanese-German relations in the Nazi era, Chinese administrators in Tibet in the late 1940s, East German propaganda during the Korean War, Simone de Beauvoir’s appraisal of the PRC, Chinese music and culture after the Lin Biao Incident, and North Korean internationalism.
Adam Cathcart 