On March 24th, 2018, over 3,000 attendees including University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty members, Katherine Bowie, Felecia Lucht, and Ellen Raferty, attended the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Washington D.C. The conference consisted of keynote speakers, an awards ceremony, exhibitions, workshops, and film screenings related to Asian Studies and various topics.
At the conference, Dr. Lucht along with many others participated in a President’s Panel and presented the launch of the Association for Asian Studies Language Database Project of Least Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) of Asia. This project is being supported by the Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes (WISLI) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, in coordination with the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. The goal is to help promote national access to pedagogically informed LCTL instruction. While instruction in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is widely available in North America, relatively few universities offer instruction in the so–called Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) of Asia. The selected target languages of this website range across the vast and diverse geography of East and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.