Japan Lecture Series 2005-2006

Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas  

Free admission

For more information, contact Mieko U. Peek at mpeek@lyon.edu

Dr. Anne Prescott received her B.M.Ed. from Cornell College and her M.M. and Ph.D. from Kent State University. Dr. Prescott has been playing the koto (13 string instrument) for more than 20 years. She spent eight years in Japan studying the koto and shamisen, including one year as a Japanese Ministry of Education scholar at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. While in Japan, Dr. Prescott performed regularly in the Tokyo area, including in a concert attended by Empress Michiko. In the U.S. she has given numerous performances at schools, museums, universities and other venues. Dr. Prescott is currently an outreach coordinator at the East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University.  She was previously on the faculty at Augustana College where she taught East Asian music, Japanese culture, and the koto, and directed the Augustana Koto Ensemble. Dr. Prescott’s publications include “The Donkey’s Ears Go Flop, Flop: Miyagi Michio’s Koto Works for Children” in Asian Music and a Japan Digest article on koto music for the National Clearinghouse for US-Japan Studies. She recently conducted the third “Teaching East Asian Music in the Elementary Classroom” summer workshop at Indiana University.

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Dr. Scott Schnell received his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the Ohio State University. He also has master’s degrees in Natural Resources and East Asian Languages and Literatures. He is currently associate professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa where he teaches courses on cultural ecology, the anthropology of religion, ritual and performance, and Japanese society and culture. His research interests include social organization and conflict, ritual and sociopolitical change, popular religion and the conceptualization of nature, historical ethnography, and expressive culture. He has been both a Fulbright scholar and a visiting research fellow at the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology. He is the author of The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in a Japanese Community (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), which explores the use of ritual as an effective medium for negotiating sociopolitical and economic change.

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