Archival Research in East Asian Studies Research Cluster (APSI)

Speaker: Dr. Peter Zhou, Director, Soong Archive Project, Former Assistant University Librarian and Director of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, UC Berkeley.

Workshop 4: From Archives to Inquiry: New Horizons in East Asian Studies

In recent years, newly developed archival collections in East Asian studies have opened exciting avenues for research and discovery in the historical, cultural, and social development of China and the broader East Asian region. In this talk, I will introduce three significant archives housed at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of UC Berkeley: the Paul Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies 方保罗中国电影研究资料特藏, the largest archival collection on Chinese film studies in North America; the Yuen Ren Chao Papers 赵元任档案, the personal archive of an influential scholar widely regarded as the “father of modern Chinese linguistics”; and the James Soong Archive 宋楚瑜档案, one of our most recent acquisitions, comprising more than 100,000 items documenting the democratization process in modern Taiwan. I will highlight key features of these collections and present selected artifacts that illustrate their scholarly significance.

Through this discussion, I will address both the content and the methodology of conducting meaningful research in Chinese studies. In particular, I will demonstrate how the development of new archival collections can catalyze emerging fields of inquiry, how primary sources can be used to formulate significant research questions, and how scholars can move from archival annotation and interpretation toward the production of original scholarly publications. Even though the featured materials are mostly for Chinese studies, I will briefly relate to our efforts in and plans for building archival materials for Japanese and Korean studies as well.