CRC Associate Director
Dr. Linda Learman

Dr. Learman has an A.M. in Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and this spring completed her Ph.D. requirements in anthropology at Boston University. She has strong background in Chinese religions (especially Ch’an) and Japanese Zen in Japan and the West. Publication of her edited volume Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization is expected from the University of Hawaii Press this November. Her dissertation “Modernity, Marriage, and Religion: Buddhist Marriages in Taiwan” also reflects an interest in religion and social change. It focuses on the continuities and changes to marriage mores and behavior in twentieth-century Taiwan, contrasting followers of popular religion and the new Humanistic Buddhism there. An abiding question throughout her graduate studies has been the social consequences, intended and unintended, of religious belief and practice.

This is Dr. Learman’s first time with the Friends World Program, but as an undergraduate she participated in the University of Wisconsin’s College Year in India Program in Andhra Pradesh and lived and traveled in India and Sri Lanka for almost two years. As a girl she lived in Brazil for three and a half years and later worked in England for almost two—experiences that both convinced her of the rewards of experiential, cross-cultural learning and, she says, “reflect the realities of contemporary life, wherein people the world over are often uprooted from their native place and still must be productive under fast-changing and unfamiliar circumstances.”

CRC ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Bjorn Sorenson

Bjorn Sorenson is joining the CRC program for the third time. Currently Assistant Director and Field Administrator, he was previously faculty assistant (02-03) and an associate student (99-00). Bjorn recieved his BA in Music and Comparative Religion from Western Michigan University and a MTS degree from Harvard Divinity School. He has also studied international conflict resolution at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and is a trained mediator for the state of Michigan. His interests over the years have ranged from photography and ethnomusicology to international law and conflict resolution, though he claims they are all related. Bjorn's favorite CRC experience is the part between when it begins and when it ends. Oddly enough, he also claims the time after CRC as his favorite.

Justin O’Jack

Justin will be the CRC coordinator for the China term and the Director of the China Center for the 2004-2005 year. A longtime student of the University of California since 1988, Justin received his B.A. in the Department of History from the Santa Cruz campus in 1993, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum laude, but it was his junior year abroad in New Delhi, India, that changed his life and his philosophy of education. His senior research focused on Chinese religious geography and pilgrimage traditions, an interest that again led him abroad on an academic exchange program, this time in China. After a two-year extended stay in southwest and eastern China, Justin resumed his graduate studies at the University of California in 1998 and continues to pursue his Ph.D. Justin’s dissertation research is an historical and geographic analysis of the imperial patronage of Chinese Buddhist monasteries that resulted in the creation of four national pilgrimage centers in the Ming dynasty. Justin lives in eastern China between homes in Shanghai and Hangzhou and enjoys traveling in the countryside and hiking in the mountains with his friends.

Zhan Tianxiang

Professor Zhan Tianxiang, called Tian by his American students and friends, is the longest standing staff member at the China Center, having joined the Friends World community soon after the Center moved to Hangzhou in 1989. Professor Zhan first began his employment with us as a lecturer and in 1991 he became a formal Faculty Advisor. Since then he has taught an Area Studies course on modern Chinese history and culture, and several engaging seminars on the legacy of Chairman Mao during the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, landmark periods in modern Chinese history that he experienced firsthand. As a dedicated member of our host university in China for the last forty years, Professor Zhan graduated in 1966 with a B.A. from then Hangzhou University, just prior to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, at which time he was sent to the countryside to work as a high school teacher deep in the mountains for over a decade. When he returned to Hangzhou soon after the revolution, he resumed his graduate work at the newly reopened university, and in 1982 received his M.A. in History. He immediately began employment at his alma mater as a lecturer and became a full professor in 1990, where he continues to teach the history of world civilizations and cultural anthropology, focusing on religious value systems and family structure. Professor Zhan also spent a one-year stint as a visiting scholar at Indiana University in 1984, and an eight-year stretch as the Deputy Director of the Department of History at Hangzhou University, beginning in 1986, and every summer since 2000, he has taught courses on Chinese history and culture at Portland State University. With the reopening of the Friends World China Center in 2004, Professor Zhan will assume the position of Executive Director, and he will continue to serve as Faculty Advisor and Program Coordinator for students interested in Global Health and Healing Traditions in China.

Liu Wei

Professor Liu Wei began serving the China Center in 1996 as a regular guest speaker, and in 1997 he became a formal staff member and Faculty Advisor. Since then he has taught an Area Studies course on contemporary Chinese history and politics and several seminars on Chinese foreign relations. Professor Liu graduated with a Ph.D. in History from Nanjing University in 1989, after completing his dissertation research at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, where he studied eighteenth-century English political history. Soon after graduation, he began teaching as a lecturer of political science at the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at Zhejiang University. He then returned to the University of Edinburgh to work as a postdoctoral researcher in 1992, where he studied the history of late eighteenth-century Sino-British relations. He became an associate professor at Zhejiang University in 1993, where he continues to teach world political history in the Department of Global Studies. Professor Liu also continues to supplement his academic career with an intriguing vocation in television. For seven years beginning in 1994, he worked for China Central Television as a part-time host of a literary review program and he currently hosts a program about local popular culture in Hangzhou on Zhejiang Provincial Television. With the reopening of the Friends World China Center in 2004, Professor Liu will continue in his position of Faculty Advisor and will serve as the Program Coordinator for students interested in Peace and Reconciliation in China.

In addition to faculty and staff of the Friends World South Asian Center in Bangalore, the program will include guest lecturers from the Gandhi National Museum and the Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts in New Delhi, Guru Nanak Dev University and the Miri Piri Academy in Amritsar, the Root Institute in Bodhgaya, and the Krishnamurti Study Center and Benaras Hindu University in Varanasi.