Reaching for the Stars as a Global Citizen

Dean Jeff Moore joined UCF in 1994 as the university’s first full-time percussion professor. He served as chair of the Music Department from 2009-13 and began his role as the director of UCF’s newly created School of Performing Arts in 2013. Under his leadership, both the theatre and music departments received national accreditation or reaccreditation. Moore also helped create UCF Celebrates the Arts, a multi-week festival that highlights UCF’s arts and interdisciplinary programs. During his music and teaching career, Dean Moore has been involved with more than 60 literary and music projects as an author, composer or arranger, and is an international performer, lecturer, clinician and soloist. His service on nonprofit boards and committees has helped build an awareness of the importance of the arts in our lives. Dean Moore holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of North Texas and a master’s degree in percussion performance from the University of Wisconsin.

Cyrus Ali Zargar earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Near Eastern Studies in 2008. Dr. Zargar’s research interests include Classical Sufism, Islamic Philosophy, Arabic and Persian Sufi Literature, and Ethics in Literature and Film.

Dr. Zargar’s two most recent publications were released in the summer of 2024. The first, Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ʿAṭṭār, was published by the State University of New York Press. The second, The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility, was published by Routledge.

Dr. Hong’s research focuses on the digital study of religions, Chinese religions and society, economic history, and Modern China. Dr. Hong has published several books and many research articles and book chapters in the fields of the spatial study of Chinese religious sites, Chinese house churches, and modern China. His recent book, The Price of China’s Economic Development: Power, Capital, and the Poverty of Rights, has been published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2015. As a PI and co-PI, he has received more than $12 million in grants in support of his interdisciplinary research projects. Recently, as a PI, he received $700,000 in grants from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the digital study of Chinese religions and society.

Currently, Dr. Hong is serving as the Chief Research Officer and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fordham University. He also has served as the Chief Research Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Professional Development at Purdue University Northwest, Co-Director of the Center on Religions and Chinese Society at Purdue University, and Associate Vice President for Sponsored Research and Faculty Development at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

My scholarly interests are in the area of historical consciousness and systems of thought. I am less interested in the past itself than in the histories that humans in different cultural contexts have made of it. History-making is a continual human activity, and I study the ways in which perceptions of and narratives about the different pasts are located, constructed, and given form. I think about the ways that historical sites, genres, and practices mediate the pasts we seek to comprehend. I have written about topics that range from the advent of literacy and historical manuscript production in premodern Indonesia to contemporary American historical film production related to the Vietnam War. My current research project is on how visual histories of the Vietnam War rely on genre conventions and other narratological features to construct the past in particular and peculiar ways.

Mei Han is the founding director of MTSU Center for Chinese Music and Culture. She received her doctoral and master’s degrees in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in Musicology from the National Arts Academy of China. Dr. Han’s academic research fields include the music of China, East Asia, and cross-cultural music communication. Her publications include journal articles, book chapter, and entries for The Groves Dictionary of Musical Instruments and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. She has presented at numerous international conferences and lectured at higher institutions globally.

Dr. Han is an internationally acclaimed concert artist on the zheng (Chinese long zither). She received two Juno nominations (Canadian Music Award). Her unique position as an international performer and scholar was recognized by Bruno Nettl (1930-2020) in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions (2015), the primary textbook for the discipline.

A native of Pound Ridge, New York, Dr. Keith Knapp received his B.A. in History and Asian Studies from the State University of New York at Albany and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in East Asian History from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of early medieval China (AD 100-600); he is particularly interested in the moral and religious values that people of this era used to navigate and understand their world. He has authored Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China (2005), as well as numerous book chapters and articles. He is one of the co-editors of Early Medieval Chinese Texts: A Bibliographic Guide (2015), and the long-awaited Cambridge History of China, Volume Two: The Six Dynasties 220-589 (2019). Presently, he is working on two manuscripts: “The Lives of Filial Children: A Study of Two Medieval Chinese Manuscripts Preserved in Kyoto,” and “Between Fragmented and United: A History of Medieval China.”

Knapp is the Chair of the Southeast Early China Roundtable and former President of the Early Medieval China Group. He is an executive board member of the T’ang Studies Society and the Elling Eide Center (Research Library and Preserve) in Sarasota, Florida.

Dr. Richard Lewin holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Treasury & Asset Management from University of Cambridge.

Dr. Andrea Hoa Pham has been at UF since 2002. Her research interests include Vietnamese phonology, sound change, and language and gender. Her works cover various dialects of Vietnamese. She has published poems and translated a linguistic book and a bilingual poetry book, such as “Tiếng Mẹ”, a collection of Vietnamese poetry, Toronto 1997, and “Hãy nhảy cùng em – Dance with me”, a bilingual collection of poems by Andrea Hoa Pham and Lola Haskins, translated to Vietnamese by Andrea Hoa Pham, Danang Publishing House 2018.

Anastasia Salter is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and the Director of Graduate Programs and the PhD in Texts & Technology for the College of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Salter is the author of A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (University of Mississippi Press, with Mel Stanfill, October 2020), Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, with Aaron Reed and John Murray, 2020), Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Palgrave Macmillan 2017, coauthored with Bridget Blodgett), Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (Bloomsbury 2017), What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, 2014, coauthored with John Murray).

Recent collaborations include chairing the Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Arts Festival virtually in 2020; Dr. Salter is currently a member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization and the HASTAC Steering Committee, and previously served on the board and as president of the North American Simulation and Gaming Association.

Associate Professor Franz Prichard’s interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the literature, environmental thought, and visual media of contemporary Japan. In his first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019) he explored the ways Japanese writers, artists, and critics reinvented their work in response to Japan’s intensive urbanization. His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature and visual media. Weaving together the perspectives of writers, critics, photographers, and artists, among others, this research elaborates ecocritical approaches with a rigorously planetary perspective in pursuit of collaborative ways of knowing the generative relations among humans, animals, material objects, and shared worlds.

Prichard received his PhD from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2011. Prior to arriving at FSU as an Associate Professor in 2023, Prichard has taught as a lecturer at UCLA, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and at Princeton University.

Wenxian Zhang is Professor and Head of Archives & Special Collections at Rollins College’s Olin Library. He is also the college’s liaison librarian to the Anthropology, Archaeology, Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, Mathematics and Computer Science Programs. A member of the Rollins faculty since 1995, Zhang is a recipient of the Cornell Distinguished Faculty Service Award, and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow at Rollins. He has also won the Patrick D. Smith Award for his academic work with Dr. Maurice O’Sullivan on A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport (FHS Press), the Community Service Award from the Orlando Chinese Professional Association, and the Award of Excellence from the Society of Florida Archivists.

In addition to articles on library information studies, historical research, and Chinese business management, his recent book publications include The Biographical Dictionary of New Chinese Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders (Edward Elgar, 2009), A Guide to the Top 100 Companies in China (World Scientific, 2010), The Entrepreneurial and Business Elites of China: The Chinese Returnees Who Have Shaped Modern China (Emerald, 2011), A Winter in Sunshine (Shanghai University Press, 2012), China Visualized by Americans 1840-1911 (Peking University Press, 2017), China Through American Eyes: Early Depictions of the Chinese People and Culture in the US Print Media (World Scientific, 2018), and China’s Belt & Road Initiative: Changing the Rule of Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Lanlan Kuang is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Bloomington and was on a Fulbright in China in 2008-2009. Specializing in Asian arts and humanities, aesthetics, museum and heritage studies, her research focuses on media and cultural policies and their impacts on socioeconomic developments.

Kuang’s first monograph, Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context, is a part of the Pishu series published by the prestigious Social Sciences Academic Press (SSAP), the top think tank in Asia according to Foreign Policy magazine. Her second monograph, Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s Cosmopolitan New Heritage, is published by Indiana University Press in 2024. Kuang serves on the editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals and book series internationally and is chair of the Florida Folklife Council.