Posts

Soong Translation Studies award–call for entries

by at

CALL FOR ENTRIES
The 27th Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards (2024–2025)

Introduction

Stephen C. Soong (1919–1996) was a prolific writer and translator as well as an active figure in the promotion of translation education and research. To commemorate his contributions in this field, the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards were set up in 1997 by the Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a donation from the Soong family. They give recognition to academics who have made contributions to original research in Chinese Translation Studies, particularly in the use of first-hand materials for historical and cultural investigations.

Entry and Nomination

RCT invites Chinese scholars or research students in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan or overseas regions to participate in the 27th Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards (2024–2025). General regulations are as follows:

  1. All Chinese scholars or research students affiliated to higher education/research institutes in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan or overseas regions are eligible to apply.
  2. Submitted articles must be written in either Chinese or English and published in a refereed journal within the calendar year 2024. Each candidate can enter up to two articles for the Awards. The publication date, title and volume/number of the journal in which the article(s) appeared must be provided.
  3. Up to three articles are selected as winners each year. A certificate and a cheque of HK$3,000 will be awarded to each winning entry.
  4. The adjudication committee, which consists of renowned scholars in Translation Studies from Greater China, will meet in June 2025. The results will be announced in July 2025 and winners will be notified individually.
  5. Articles submitted will not be returned to the candidates.

Continue reading Soong Translation Studies award–call for entries →

Statement on Uyghur asylum seekers in Thailand

by at

See below for information on signing a statement protesting the Uyghurs being held by Thailand and who are at risk of being deported to China. –Magnus Fiskesjö

======================

Dear Friend and colleagues,

You will have seen the tragic news that 48 Uyghurs face immediate deportation from Thailand to the PRC where they will certainly face persecution.

We urge you to sign the following statement addressed to the Thai authorities asking for the group of detained Uyghur men to be given safe haven: https://forms.gle/zWw3GbTvvqiuNLRX7.

We hope that this statement will raise awareness of the detainees’ situation and prevent their deportation to the PRC.

Kind regards,

Nyrola Elimä, Rune Steenberg, David Tobin <d.tobin@sheffield.ac.uk>, and Emily Upson.

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Call for article retraction

by at

Greetings and Happy New Year. We write to bring to your attention a recent article on Tibetan children and “racial empathy bias” that was published in the US psychology journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (the journal of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race), by a pair of Han Chinese psychology scholars (Jing Sheng and Li Wang) and their graduate students at South China Normal University. In their article, they claimed that their research in the TAR among Tibetan “primary school” students received the approval of their university’s “human ethics” board, but we and others think the scholarship is deeply suspect both ethically and theoretically, in that they make racist claims about Tibetan children’s alleged “racial empathy bias” toward Han Chinese.

The scholars’ claims were so explicitly racist that the journal received complaints after it was published. To their credit, the editors published an apology, and required the authors to strike the most egregious statements (see below). However, the article was NOT retracted, and remains published in the journal. Given recent Chinese state efforts to shape scholarly discourse on Tibet abroad, we feel strongly that this article needs to be completely retracted and that the continued presence of this article and others like it in US academic journals threatens the credibility of these journals and the well-known scholars on their editorial boards (this journal seems to have a huge editorial board, as well as a large list of “editorial consultants,” scholars from major colleges and universities across the U.S.).

Please support our call to the journal editors to retract this article by signing the open letter (see below) to the editors through the Google Form link at the top of the letter. Your name and affiliation will be automatically added to the letter. Continue reading Call for article retraction →

Cutting micro-dramas down to size

by at

Source: China Media Project (1/9/25)
Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size
China’s government has signaled stricter rules this year for micro-dramas, a bite-size entertainment format with mega market potential.
By Alex Colville

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. Continue reading Cutting micro-dramas down to size →

Filmmaker sentenced for doc on White Paper protests

by at

Source: China Digital Times (1/8/25)
Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests
By 

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear protesters as “foreign forces”:

In English it was called “Not the Foreign Force.” Chen previously said that he wanted to use the documentary to counter the government’s attempt to discredit the protests and blame “foreign forces” for orchestrating dissent – a tactic often deployed by China’s ruling Communist Party to explain away moments of genuine public anger.

Like many young people who took part in the protests, it was Chen’s first time voicing his political demands in China when he took to the streets of Shanghai on November 26, 2022, according to a post he published when releasing the documentary.

He said he produced the documentary to convey his personal experience and reflections.

“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always made the scapegoat. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets, and censors, the more we must speak up, remind others, and remember,” he wrote. “Only by remembering the ugliness can we strive toward the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and future.” [Source] Continue reading Filmmaker sentenced for doc on White Paper protests →

Lingnan postdoc

by at

Applications are now invited for the following post:
Postdoctoral Fellow
The Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies
Lingnan University, HK

The Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies (The Institute) now invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in premodern Chinese literature.

The appointee’s job duties include publishing research output in venues of international standing, applying for external grants, assisting with the Institute’s projects on Chinese poetry and literary theory, and assuming teaching duties as required by the University. The appointee will have the opportunities to co-publish research articles with the Director. Abilities to apply digital humanities methods to literary studies will be a strong plus. The appointee will be provided funding for organizing up to two academic workshops on topics related to his/her research projects or co-organizing one international symposium.

General Requirements
Applicants should have a PhD in premodern Chinese literature or related fields. Applicants must be a good native or near-native writer of English, capable of translating classical Chinese literary texts.

Applicants should provide information about their qualifications, research interests and achievements along with evidence of quality teaching. Experiences with grant-funded research and grant applications are highly desirable. Candidates with less/more experience will also be considered for appointment at a relevant rank. Continue reading Lingnan postdoc →

Dissidents thought he was an ally, but he was a spy

by at

Source: NYT (1/10/25)
New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.
Shujun Wang seemed to be a Chinese democracy activist, but an F.B.I. investigation showed just how far China will go to repress citizens abroad.
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Shujun Wang, a New Yorker convicted of acting as an illegal foreign agent for the Chinese government, in December. Credit…Adam Pape for The New York Times

One morning in late July last year, Shujun Wang shuffled into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, leaning on his cane as he made his way to the defense table. Settling into a seat next to his lawyers, the 76-year-old Chinese American scholar smoothed his jet-black hair and adjusted his tie, whose red-and-blue pattern, set against his white shirt, vaguely suggested the American flag. After an exchange of greetings with his Chinese interpreter, he surveyed the courtroom with an amused expression, almost beaming at the visitors’ gallery. For someone facing trial on charges of working as an illegal agent for China, Wang looked remarkably cheerful. It was hard to say if he was oblivious to the gravity of his situation or pleased to be the center of attention.

The government accused Wang of having led a double life for years. A historian who migrated to the United States from China in 1994, he had written many books on military and naval history, including one about the heroism of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during the Second World War. Starting in the mid-2000s, he had also been a member of a community of Chinese dissidents in the United States who oppose the Chinese Communist Party and push for democratic reforms in China. Wang helped organize events and rallies in the greater New York area to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre and protest the authoritarianism of the Chinese government. In 2006, he founded, with a group of prominent dissidents, a nonprofit in Flushing, Queens, called the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, with the mission of promoting democracy in China. Warm and affable, Wang became a recognizable face within the organization, managing its media relations and working to publicize the foundation’s activities in New York’s Chinese-language newspapers.

Secretly, according to federal investigators, he was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Evidence presented at trial would show that at the direction of his handlers in the M.S.S., Wang spied on Chinese dissidents in Flushing and the New York area for years. His enthusiastic participation in the Chinese pro-democracy movement appeared to have been a ploy to gain proximity to its leaders and activists and to collect information about them for the ministry. United States authorities say the Chinese government uses such intelligence to intimidate and silence dissidents overseas. Continue reading Dissidents thought he was an ally, but he was a spy →

How China is erasing Tibetan culture

by at

Here’s snippet of a long, multimedia-based article on the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Tibetan culture.–Kirk Denton

Source: NYT (1/9/25)
How China is Erasing Tibetan Culture, One Child at a Time
By Chris Buckley

China Central Television

Across China’s west, the party is placing children in boarding schools in a drive to assimilate a generation of Tibetans into the national mainstream and mold them into citizens loyal to the Communist Party.

Tibetan rights activists, as well as experts working for the United Nations, have said that the party is systematically separating Tibetan children from their families to erase Tibetan identity and to deepen China’s control of a people who historically resisted Beijing’s rule. They have estimated that around three-quarters of Tibetan students age 6 and older — and others even younger — are in residential schools that teach largely in Mandarin, replacing the Tibetan language, culture and Buddhist beliefs that the children once absorbed at home and in village schools.

When China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, visited one such school in the summer, he inspected a dormitory that appeared freshly painted and as neat as an army barracks. He walked into a classroom where Tibetan students, listening to a lecture on Communist Party thought, stood and applauded to welcome him.

Mr. Xi’s visit to the school in Qinghai Province in June amounted to a firm endorsement of the program, despite international criticism. Education, he said, must “implant a shared consciousness of Chinese nationhood in the souls of children from an early age.”

Chinese officials say the schools help Tibetan children to quickly become fluent in the Chinese language and learn skills that will prepare them for the modern economy. They say that families voluntarily send their children to the schools, which are free, and that the students have classes in Tibetan culture and language. . . [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE (paywall)]

Disoriented Disciplines review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Bringing modern dance to China

by at

Source: NYT (12/30/24)
Bringing Modern Dance, Once Forbidden, to China
An oral history project, “Planting Seeds,” considers the history and impact of an American Dance Festival program to train dancers in China.
By Brian Seibert

A group of dancers and teachers, all Chinese with one white American man in the center.

Charles Reinhart, center, with Yang Meiqi (left) and Ruby Shang (right) and students in the Guangdong Modern Dance Experimental Program at the Guangdong Dance Academy in 1988. Credit…American Dance Festival Archives

“Why do they fall down?”

This was the question that Yang Meiqi, a Chinese dance educator, asked about the students in a modern dance class she watched in Durham, N.C., in 1986.

The person she asked was Charles Reinhart, the longtime director of the American Dance Festival, the event she was attending. His answer: “Why not?”

After a few days, Yang had another question: Could Reinhart help her start a modern dance training program in China? He could.

With funding from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States State Department, Reinhart sent American teachers to the Guangdong Dance Academy, where Yang was the principal. After four years, this program gave birth to the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, often called (not quite accurately) the first modern dance troupe in China. From this experiment much would bloom, including figures like the choreographer Shen Wei.

Reinhart, 94, has told this story many times. But not long ago, he added a coda. A little later in that summer of 1986, while Yang and Reinhart were watching a performance of the avant-garde duo Eiko and Koma, she leaned over to him and began to ask “Why do they…?” Then she stopped and answered her own question: “Why not?” The educator was already learning. Continue reading Bringing modern dance to China →

Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize

by at

NORMAN, OKLA. – An international jury has selected Taiwanese poet Ling Yü 零⾬ (Wang Meiqin 王美琴) as the winner of the 2025 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Institute for US-China Issues in the David L. Boren College of International Studies, the Newman Prize is awarded biennially to recognize outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, based solely on literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible.

Ling Yü will receive $10,000 and an engraved bronze medallion. She will be celebrated at an award symposium and banquet to be held on the OU Norman campus during the last week of March 2025 along with the winners of the International Newman Prizes for English Jueju.

Ling Yü was nominated for the prize by Professor Cosima Bruno (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), who praised her poetry for its “untrammeled, ingenious lyricism” and its ability to weave contemporary themes and personal experiences with the controlled elegance of classical Chinese poetry.

Bruno remarked in her nomination statement:

Ling Yü’s language is economical and concise, yet surprising and reverberating with complex meaning. Her poetry engages thoughtfully with classical and modern, Eastern and Western literary, philosophical, artistic, and esoteric sources, generating outstanding works that require attention but are also intuitively grasped. Through her works, readers encounter a prism of rich, elegantly employed references that span themes of meditation, travel, feminism, capitalism, the environment, mythology and more.

Ling Yü’s extensive body of work includes nine collections of poetry, such as Series on a City (《城的連作》1990), Names Disappearing on the Map (《消失在地圖上的名字》1992), Mudong Hymns (《⽊冬詠歌集》1999), I’m Heading for You (《我正前往你》2010), and her recent collections Skin-Coloured Time (《膚⾊的時光》2018) and Daughters (《女兒》2022). Her poetry spans topics such as cultural heritage, mythological figures, ecological concern, and autobiographical reflection. Her work has been widely recognized, translated into multiple languages, and presented at major international poetry festivals, including the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam and the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. Continue reading Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize →

Voicing Gender in China–cfp

by at

Voicing Gender in China
Fourth Conference of the China Academic Network on Gender
Dates: 17-18 June 2025
Location: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (France)
Deadline for abstracts (300 words): 1 February 2025
Send to: voicinggenderinchina@gmail.com

We are pleased to announce that the Fourth Conference of the China Academic Network on Gender will be hosted by the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle on 17-18 June 2025. Titled ‘Voicing Gender in China,’ the conference seeks to explore the multiple sites of intersection between voice and gender in Chinese society, past and present.

Within Chinese studies, fruitful articulations between voice and gender studies have drawn from studies of women’s political activism in history and sociology, exploring the ways in which activists and organisers have articulated new political identities in rallying cries and everyday protest. Literary scholars have looked at the shaping of gendered subjectivities through self-narratives and autobiographies, paying close attention to dialogue, orality and the mechanisms of silencing within literary establishments. In recent years, an explosion of sensory histories have explored how gender is enacted and defined through music, opera, dance and song. In parallel, sound studies scholars have brought to life the gendered soundscapes of modern and contemporary China in considering, for instance, the production of socialist state-sponsored music as well as the aural experiences of everyday life. Drawing from these multivocal approaches, this conference seeks to explore ways of rewriting into academic scholarship previously silenced minority voices, paying attention to the affective and political resonances of voicing out gender issues in different spaces, academic and public-facing. Continue reading Voicing Gender in China–cfp →

Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands

by at

Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (1/2/25)
The Battle over Politically Correct Designations for China’s Borderlands
By Bruce Humes

The word “Tibet” has been replaced by “Himalayan World” accompanied by “Tibetan art.”

Labels matter. As Confucius (reportedly) said:

名不正，則言不順
言不順，則事不成

If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate.
If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished.

— The Analects (Trans. Raymond Dawson)

New politically correct designations for China’s traditional frontiers — homelands to Tibetans, Mongols and Turkic Muslims  — are emerging, but their usage outside the Middle Kingdom is proving controversial.

According to a report by Radiofrance (le mot “Tibet” supprimé), two major museums in Paris made changes to their labeling of Tibetan art in 2023 and 2024. On the explanatory panels in its galleries, Quai Branly began replacing “Tibet” with “Xizang,” China’s name for the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Then Musée Guimet — which houses one of the largest collections of Asian Art outside of Asia — repackaged its “Nepal-Tibet” section as “Monde Himalayen” (Himalayan World).

These changes were noted and vigorously critiqued by French scholars, who accused the museums of bowing to pressure from China in its campaign to force the outside world to accept its colonialist terminology. “Is it the job of museums to rewrite history at the behest of an authoritarian regime? “ queries French Tibetologist Katia Buffetrille, according to Radiofrance. Continue reading Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands →

MLA Forum committee candidates

by at

The MLA Forum for Modern and Contemporary Chinese invites self-nominations for executive committee candidates. Executive committee members serve a five-year term, beginning at the MLA Annual Convention in 2026, and must be prepared to retain MLA membership and regularly attend the MLA Convention during this period. The Forum will vote on nominees at the coming convention in New Orleans, Jan. 9-11, 2025.

If you wish to be considered, please send a short paragraph detailing your goals for the MLA Modern and Contemporary Chinese forum to nmv10@psu.edu and nkisaacs@ncsu.edu no later than 6 January, 2024.

Candidates must meet the following criteria to be appointed:

  • Must be an MLA member: If they aren’t currently, the appointee can join or renew and then be eligible.
  • Cannot already be serving on another forum executive committee, unless their term ends in January of 2025.
  • Cannot have served on the executive committee to which they are being appointed after 2018.

For more information, email Nathaniel Isaacson (Secretary) – nkisaacs@ncsu.edu, or Nicolai Volland (Chair) nmv10@psu.edu.

Posted by: Nathaniel Isaacson <nkisaacs@ncsu.edu>