Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, China, hosts the first Puget Sound exchange scholar
TACOMA, Wash. – Pierre Ly, associate professor in the international political economy at the University of Puget Sound, will travel to China this month as the first exchange scholar in a new partnership with a major Chinese university.
The Puget Sound–Fujian Normal University Faculty Exchange Program, generously supported by the Trimble Foundation, aims to foster scholarly and cultural interactions between the two universities. It allows a faculty member from each institution to spend up to a month on the partner campus in alternating years.
The program aligns with the University of Puget Sound’s ongoing engagement with the Pacific Rim, which provides opportunities for intercontinental scholarship, student study abroad, and trans-Pacific partnerships with universities, civic organizations, and research centers.
Ly will spend four weeks in Fuzhou, China, a modern city of more than two million residents located on China’s southeastern coast between Shanghai and Hong Kong. He will spend three of those weeks at Fujian Normal University, a century-old comprehensive institution known for its innovative and interdisciplinary academic programs.
In addition to giving a lecture at the campus and exchanging ideas with professors and students, Ly will use his time there to continue research for a book about the Chinese wine industry's development. Ly will be joined by his co-author and wife Cynthia Howson, lecturer in the Ethnic, Gender, and Labor Studies program at the University of Washington Tacoma.
“The story of Chinese wine is about politics, globalization, economic growth, environmental challenges, land rights, and governance,” Ly says. “But it is also a story of farmers growing grapes and wineries making something everyone wants to drink. This trip provides an invaluable opportunity for us to develop our book by exchanging ideas with Chinese scholars and students across disciplines, and by presenting my work to a local audience.”
In the 2013 and 2014 summer period, Ly and Howson traveled to major Chinese wine regions to interview winery owners, winemakers, grape growers, journalists, retailers, consultants, and wine experts. Since then, they have made presentations, published magazine articles, and been quoted in the Chinese press. This return visit will allow them to do more field research, including visiting Grace Vineyard, one of the country’s successful wineries, and wine shops run by Everwines, a retailer owned by the Spanish wine giant Bodegas Torres. Ly also anticipates using the time in China to improve his Mandarin.
Press photos of Pierre Ly and Cynthia Howson in China are available upon request.
Photos on page: Top right: Pierre Ly and Cynthia Howson (right) with a winery executive at the Great Wall; Above left: Pierre Ly (by Ross Mulhausen); Above right: A shopping center in Fuzhou (by Jack Parkinson)
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