EASC is pleased to announce that Chris White joined the East Asian Studies Center as assistant director on August 1.

Chris holds a PhD in Chinese History from Xiamen University in 2011, where he also served as director of the Center for International Education and Exchanges and an instructor at Xiamen’s Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics. From 2015-18, he was a post-doctoral research fellow with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He returned to the US in 2018, to become assistant director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University, where he also became a visiting instructor at Purdue’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program. He is a widely published expert on Chinese history and religion, and has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Theological College in Singapore and at the Lam East-West Institute in Hong Kong. He is currently the book review editor for the Review of Religion and Chinese Society, and has been involved with major grants from the Templeton Foundation and the Kay Family Foundation. He is also an Ohio native, with an MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Chris will be responsible for the day-to-day administration of EASC, which includes management of the center’s fiscal and HR operations; program development and support; academic, student, and outreach oversight; event coordination; general coordination of the interdisciplinary MA program in East Asian Studies; and fiscal and data management. He will also collaborate with EASC director Mitch Lerner to develop programming goals and short-and long-term strategies; draft grant reports and proposals, assess and evaluate programming; collect and maintain program and impact data; research new funding opportunities; administer the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship and other Title VI programs; produce newsletters and website content; and support career advising and other professional development programming.