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CEAPS Graduate Student Travel Grant Application
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The Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (CEAPS) Graduate Student Travel Grant provides travel awards for graduate students to present papers at professional conferences or to conduct dissertation research in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the greater Pacific region. Priority will be given to those proposals that concern East Asian and Pacific issues. The number of awards is determined each year based on funding availability. 

Conference Travel

For AY 2024 - 2025, at least 8 awards (up to $600 for domestic travel/up to $1,000 for international travel) will be granted per semester. Paper acceptance at the time of application is required.

Dissertation Research Travel

For AY 2024 - 2025, at least 1 award (up to $2,000) will be granted per semester to a doctoral student conducting fieldwork research in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the greater Pacific region for periods up to 12 months.

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Eligibility

Applicants must be registered full-time and in good academic standing during the term the award is received. Students in non-degree, online, cost-recovery, and self-supporting programs are ineligible.

Applicants may receive only one Conference Travel Award and one Dissertation Research Travel Award per academic year. The past recipients may reapply; however, the priority will be given to new applicants.

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Application Requirements

Conference Travel Grant

Dissertation Research Travel Grant

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Application Review/Deadlines

Applications are reviewed and approved semi-annually by the CEAPS Advisory Board. For conference travel, preference will be given to conference presentations with strong East Asian and Pacific Studies focus at national and international conferences. For dissertation travel, the board considers the necessity for travel, the significance, coherence, and feasibility of the proposed research as determined from the proposal. Doctoral students who are not able to conduct fieldwork oversea due to travel restrictions may request support to conduct research in the States.

Fall 2024 Competition

  • Submission Deadline: October 15, 2024 (11:59 pm CT)
  • Award Notification: November 2024
  • Travel Period: The proposed travel should take place during the 12 months following the award. Retroactive funding will NOT be considered. The dates of travel must occur after the results release date.

Fall 2024 CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Travel Grant Application Form

Fall 2024 CEAPS Graduate Student Dissertation Research Grant Application Form

Faculty Recommendation Form

Spring 2025 Competition

  • Submission Deadline: February 15, 2025 (11:59 pm CT)
  • Award Notification: March 2025
  • Travel Period: The proposed travel should take place during the 12 months following the award. Retroactive funding will NOT be considered. The dates of travel must occur after the results release date.

Application forms will be available in 2025.

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Award Payment

Awards will be offered as reimbursement for travel. Allowable expenses include air travel, lodging, ground transportation, and other travel-related expenses for the awardee only. Awardees are required to submit original receipts supporting travel expenses to CEAPS for reimbursement within one month after travel has concluded.

Campus policy requires students traveling under University sponsorship overseas to enroll in University-approved International Insurance through campus International Safety and Security Office. See Illinois International Safety and Security website for details.

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Questions

Please direct all questions to CEAPS Associate Director Yuchia Chang at yuchia@illinois.edu

Fall 2023 Awardees

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Fall 2023 Awardees

Hanna Kim
Hanna Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership (EPOL) with a concentration in Global Studies in Education at UIUC. Her research interests align with a sense of belonging and identity among Asian international students in US higher education, as well as Asian American history education, where she is currently involved in the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) project. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D. program, she worked for World Vision Korea (NGO) as a broadcast filing coordinator and studied for her master's in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Mississippi.
Something Hanna is passionate about is she hopes to contribute to creating a welcoming climate in academic communities where all students feel they belong to the department and university.

Hanna's is presenting a paper titled, "Transnational Experiences of Korean International Doctoral Students in the U.S. with Foreign Policy Implication," at The Association for the Study of Higher Education in Minneapolis, MN.

Haiyi Li
Haiyi took his undergraduate degree from Centre college in central Kentucky. During his  Kentucky time, he became interested in the analytic philosophy, notably thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Frege, and Marx. He was trained to think like a philosopher. His dream is to become a thinker one day, just reading some boring philosophy pieces while sitting in my cozy chair drinking coffee hahaha...
Haiyi is passionate about theories, theories, and theories!!!
Haiyi came to his paper topic because, "gender comes to me as a unique subject capturing my intellectual curiosity from the beginning of my career. My research is greatly indebted to the gender theorists such as Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and Traub. I am truly fascinated by how well their arguments challenge our notion about our identity, body, and sex. So I decide to focus on the issues of how gender affected the everyday experience for people living in the eighteenth century rural China. Gradually, I become interested in reading about the lived experience of widows, their struggles with their male relatives, and sometimes the stories about their sexuality. Through my research I find a world in which widows were portrayed as masculine figures, despite the fact that their widowhood was oftentimes celebrated by the male elites as the fulfillment of their femininity. I am amazed by how much the experience of these pre-modern widows challenged the binary of gender, revealing the complexity of gender performances in a pre-modern society."

Haiyi is presenting a paper titled, "Gender, State, and Power: A Power of Windows in Eighteenth - Century Rural China," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Lingyan Liu
Lingyan is presenting a paper titled, "Sounds of Antiquity, Awakenings, and Apprehension: Listening to Night Watchmen in China 1910s - 1940s," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Woohui Park
Woohui is a PhD student in the Department of EALC. She has extensively explored intellectual history and philosophy in late Qing and early Modern China with a specific focus on the transformation of Confucian thoughts among Chinese intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Woohui holds a Master's degree in the Department of Philosophy at Korea University and earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Seoul.
Woohui is passionate about aiming to examine the transition and intellectual debate over ritual and law after the promulgation of the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Daqing xin xinglü) in the early 1900s while tracing the interdisciplinary approaches of philosophy, intellectual history, and institutional history
Woohui came to her paper topic by delving into how modern Confucian scholars in the late Qing grappled with the complex concept of ritual (li) to reconceptualize it as a traditional institution. This prompted her to focus on the topic for the upcoming AAS presentation, zooming in on Zhang Taiyan's (###) intellectual journey as he fragmented the unified and universal understandings of ritual and ritualism.

Woohui is presenting a paper titled, "Navigating the Dissonance of Ritual and Ritualism in Twentieth Century China: A Study of Zhang Taiyan's Re-Conceptualization of Ritual," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

Yujie Pu
Yujie is currently studying East Asian history. She studied in the department of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before U of I.
Yujie is dedicated to learning about and enhancing health and wellness through both her research and everyday life.
Her presentation delves into the issue of criminal responsibility of suspects with mental illness in late imperial China. This topic is a crucial component of her dissertation project, which examines the regulation of madness in Chinese history.

Yujie is presenting a paper titled, "The Boundary between Insanity and Criminal Responsibility in Qing China," at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Seattle, WA.

David Kwon Kwan Tsoi

David holds a MPhil and a BA in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now a doctoral student in cultural anthropology. He is interested in the state-society relations, governmentality, and diaspora under authoritarian governance, particularly in the context of the post-2019 Hong Kong. His previous work is about queer politics and sex work in Asia. He has published in Sexualities
David came to his paper topic when after taking a graduate seminar "Decolonizing Knowledge" with Dr. Faye Harrison, he decided to write a paper about colonial and decolonial politics in Hong Kong in the aftermath of 2019 social movement. Hong Kong's distinctive geopolitical and historical positioning as a postcolonial city in China has offer a gap in the literature of decolonial studies. As such, David presented a paper on the way Hong Kongers strategically deploy coloniality to navigate what he calls multiple hegemonies in the 2023 American Anthropological Association meeting.

David is presenting a paper titled, "Strategic Coloniality: Political Subjectivity and Multiple Hegemonies in Hong Kong," at the 2023 American American Anthropological Association/Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto, Canada.

Spring 2023 Awardees

CEAPS Graduate Student Conference Research Travel Grant Spring 2023 Awardees

Myung Jung Kim

 

Myung Jung Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at UIUC. Her research addresses topics at the intersection of conflict, international law, and transitional justice.  Her research broadly is guided by the question of what decides the intricate balance of peace and justice and how it is achieved. Prior to the doctoral program, she worked as a researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification. She also holds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a B.A. from Purdue University.

 

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Katherine Kwak

 

Katherine (Seung Ah) Kwak is a Linguistics PhD student and a Korean teaching assistant at UIUC. She specializes in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and heritage language acquisition. Specifically, Katherine is interested in how Korean heritage speakers process Korean sentences using psycholinguistic methods. With the CEAPS travel award, she will be presenting a linguistics research study at the 26th Annual Conference of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. This pilot study explores Korean learners' feelings toward the use of Korean folktales in the classroom. Upon completion of the PhD in Linguistics, Katherine hopes to pursue an academic career.

 

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Lingyan Liu

 

Lingyan Liu is a PhD candidate in the History Department. Born and raised in China, she got her BA in Opera, Film, and Literature and MA in Chinese Modern Literature. She is currently working on a dissertation provisionally titled That Hideous Sound: Singing, Shouting and Shrilling of Chinese and Chinese Americans, 1850s-1930s, which explores sonic stigmas attached to Chinese people and Chinese soundscapes. She investigates how the sounds of Chinese labors, street hawkers, opera performers, and festival firecrackers were historically constructed as unnatural, unpleasant, jarring, and monstrous. Her research is funded by the Humanities Research Institute this academic year.

 

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Lucie Lu

 

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I study international relations with a regional focus on China. My research delves into China’s global influences in three international regimes: media, human rights and foreign aid. I observe China is adept at using innovative propaganda strategies to improve the public’s perceptions of home government performances. I also discover that China’s subtle approach to shaping human rights norms, leading to greater receptiveness to their perspectives in the Global South than we expected. Finally, my research shows that China is skillful at using overseas development to extend its influence over recipient countries.

 

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Kyoko Sawada

 

Kyoko is a 2nd year MA Student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their major area of interest is Japanese pedagogy, with general research interests in Japanese linguistics and Japanese aesthetics. They work as a graduate assistant with the Center of East Asian and Pacific Studies. Their interests include Japanese pedagogy and aesthetics.

 

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Yuefan Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her interdisciplinary dissertation is about gender and garden literature from 16th- to 19-centuries China. She has presented her research at several international conferences such as AAS, AAS-in-Asia, ACCL, MLA, and ASECS. She has also published in both English and Chinese journals, such as Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, Prism: Theory and Chinese Modern Literature, 文學 (Literature), 闡釋學學刊 (Journal of Hermeneutics), etc.  

 

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CEAPS Graduate Student Dissertation Research Travel Grant Spring 2023 Awardees          

 

Arya Budi

 

Arya Budi is a Ph.D. student in Political Science. The mass public's growing behavioral and attitudinal excesses in favoring a political leader motivate him to investigate the origins of presidential identification. By conducting a cross-national study and closely examining the case of Indonesia, Arya is familiar with electoral studies through multiple approaches. Before coming to Illinois, he was a research manager, a Jakarta-based pollster, and a researcher at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. He was also a fellow at Electoral Integrity Project and Global South Academic Network. He has published his works in several academic outlets and op-eds.