Speaker Series Audience

Speaker Series lectures are generally given from 5 pm to 6 pm on Thursday evenings on the campus of the National University of Mongolia. The lectures are 40-50 minutes in length, with an opportunity for audience members to ask questions. From 6 pm to 7 pm audience members are invited to the ACMS reading room for refreshments and an opportunity for further discussion.

The ACMS invites researchers and scholars to present public lectures at the ACMS Speaker Series on a rolling basis. If you are planning to visit Mongolia between late August and early July to conduct research or study, please contact info@mongoliacenter.org to schedule a date to present. The lectures must be conducted in English, and all academic disciplines are welcome. The Speaker Series is a great opportunity for scholars to present their work and for the general public to learn about academic research in Mongolia. Please notify the ACMS at least two weeks prior to your proposed date to speak in order to allow enough time to advertise the lecture.

The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) invites researchers and scholars to present public lectures during the ACMS Spring 2010 Speaker Series. If you are planning to visit Mongolia between February and June 2010 to conduct research or study, please contact info@mongoliacenter.org to schedule a date to participate in this public lecture series. The lectures must be conducted in English, and all academic disciplines are welcome. The Speaker Series is a great opportunity for scholars to present their work and for the general public to learn about academic research in Mongolia. Please notify the ACMS at least two weeks prior to your proposed date to speak in order to allow enough time to advertise the lecture.

The Inner Mongolian Dance, Andai, as Dance Therapy

March 18th, 2010, 5pm, Lecture Hall 407, Building No.5 NUM

Mongolian shamanism deals to a great extent with healing and the fixing of community ills or personal wrongs as well as the relationship of humankind to the natural world and its spirits. Drumming, playing the aman khuur, singing, and dancing may be part of a ritual or a healing session. The Inner Mongolian dance, andai, is a dance derived from shamanism, which began as a method of treating a "heavy disease" among young women. Dance therapy consists of fairly recent western therapies which use dance and movement for healing purposes. Dance therapy also incorporates recent scientific knowledge about the brain and its role in healing, which may have some usefulness in describing what happens in andai. Some approaches to dance therapy also look at the spiritual aspects of dance and healing and this is another area where it and Mongolian shamanic dance may intersect. In this paper, I will examine the dance andai in terms of its connection to dance therapy to discover what properties may contribute to its effectiveness in healing.

Catherine Kmita is an ACMS Research Fellow and doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Her Master’s research combined Dance, Anthropology, and Asian Studies, to explore the Inner Mongolian dance, andai, through the lens of shamanic dance. Now she is looking at therapeutic aspects of shamanic dance in Buryatia, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia by focusing on political interactions, the dance community, religious practices, and medical practices. 

Speech Perception in Khalkha Mongolian: A Psycholinguistic Survey

April 1st, 2010 5pm, Lecture Hall 407, Building No.5 NUM

Amy LaCross will present the results of her most recent Mongolian psycholinguistic experiment, which identifies, for the first time, an effect of word frequency in Mongolian word perception. This experiment is part of her larger research project which explores how regularity within language may affect the ways in which language speakers perceive and mentally process language. In addition, a brief overview of the field of psycholinguistics and its relevance to Mongolian studies will be included.

Amy LaCross is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona. She is currently a Fellow of the American Center for Mongolian Studies and is in Mongolia to conduct fieldwork for her dissertation. Her research focuses on phonology and sycholinguistics, with a particular focus on vowel harmonic languages, speech perception and lexical organization.

Below is a list of all previous Speaker Series lecturers since 2004. The list is preseneted in chronological order beginning with the most recent lecture from the previous season. 

Interdependent Co-arising: Contemporary Ideas of Buddhism in Ulaanbaatar

MARCH 4, 2010, 5PM ROOM 305, BUILDING NO. 5 NUM

Saskia Anderson

Saskia Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department of the University of Western Australia. She is currently finishing up her anthropological fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar where she has been researching Buddhism for the last 12 months. Her academic interests include religion, psychology, rationality, evolutionary theory, globalisation and environmentalism.

Mongolian tea culture

February 25th, 2010 5pm Room 305, Building No.5 NUM

Gaby Bamana

Gaby is a Congo (Democratic Republic) national and has been living and working in Mongolia for about 10 years. His first research position was with the Antoon Mostaert Center before he started his Ph.D program at the University of Wales, Lampeter. At the same time Gaby was recruited as researcher at the National University of Mongolia, Center for the Study of Nomadic Culture and Civilization. In 2008, he wrote a book called "On the Tea Road".

The Genghis Khan Exhibition: Introducing Mongolian History and Culture to the U.S.

Don Lessem, Exhibition Creator and Developer

Friday, February 19, 2010, 3-4 PM Ancient History Gallery, National History Museum

Don Lessem

Don Lessem has written more than 50 popular science books on the subject of dinosaurs. He has been sponsoring and participating in dinosaur excavations since 1988 in Mongolia, China and Argentina, has written and hosted Discovery Channel and NOVA documentaries on dinosaurs, and is a television and radio commentator on dinosaur discoveries. Mr. Lessem has created several of the most popular traveling museum exhibitions of dinosaurs, including Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Chinasaurs. The Genghis Khan Exhibit and catalogue is his latest venture.

Co-sponsored by the National Museum of Mongolia.

Transition and New Public Management in Mongolia: A Comparative Perspective

December 17th, 5pm Room 305, Building No.5 NUM

David Hausman

David Hausman is a Research Specialist at the Institution for Fragile States Initiative, a joint program of the Woodrow Wilson School and Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University. He received his degree from Harvard University. He traveled to Vietnam and the Solomon Islands to conduct semi-structured recorded interviews with key actors in recent civil service reform efforts. The results of his comparative research will be included in a forthcoming book on governance traps.

Chasing the Singers: Transition of the Mongolian Long-Song (Urtiin-Duu) in Post-Socialist Mongolia

December 10th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Sunmin Yoon

The name “long-song” is derived not from the length of the song, but by an elongating of vowels in the lyrics, resulting in a variety of musical ornamentations. As everyday music, it accompanied pastoral Mongolians as they herded and traveled along the lonesome roads. During the socialist regime however, this genre was diminished through selective governmental promotion. When the socialist government ultimately collapsed in 1990, this genre became newly “imagined” and accepted as a “new national symbol” for the country to utilize in seeking a new national, collective identity. Subsequently, numerous individual musicians in Ulaanbaatar and the countryside have responded in various ways to this genre. This presentation will illustrate the music and stories of long-song singers of various backgrounds and lives, providing a rare case study of these changes.

Sunmin Yoon is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is in Mongolia from 2009-2010 on an Anne Wylie dissertation Fellowship to conduct interviews and collect data from the countryside for her dissertation research, which is the topic of this seminar. She is a performing artist as well as a researcher and instructor at her university.