Frank Joseph Shulman, a long-time CEAL member, wrote the biographical sketch below.
Frank Joseph Shulman (1943- ) has been a professional bibliographer, editor and consultant for Western-language reference works first and foremost on East Asia and secondly on Southeast Asia and South Asia for more than fifty years. He is respectively the author, compiler and editor of many annotated bibliographies, scholarly guides, directories, and news notes that have been published in the United States, Europe and Asia since 1969. A few of the more important publications among them have respectively been prepared together with Leonard H.D. Gordon, Robert E. Ward, his wife Anna Leon Shulman, and Archie R. Crouch. In addition, he founded and manages the Asian Studies Newsletter Archives, has written a 411 page master’s thesis on early postwar Japanese-Middle Eastern economic and political relations, and is slowly moving ahead towards the completion and publication of an annotated guide to nearly 15,000 Western-language doctoral dissertations on Korea dating from the years 1903-2004. While simultaneously carrying on these and other bibliographical endeavors, he served as an associate editor from 1997 through 2020 — and to a smaller extent before then, as an assistant editor and as a bibliographical consultant — of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). With 941,479 records as of mid- February 2021 (his and Anna’s last contribution together), the BAS since the late 1940s has been the most extensive bibliographical database overall for Western-language research covering academic subjects in the humanities and the social sciences on East, Southeast and South Asia published from 1971 onwards. Furthermore, between 1969 and the early 1990s, he compiled, edited and published through the AAS a classified bibliographical column of newly completed dissertations on Asia that in the mid-1970s evolved under his editorship into the annotated bibliographical journal Doctoral Dissertations on Asia (DDOA).
Frank worked from 1976 to 2001 as a professional librarian at the University of Maryland, College Park Libraries. For much of that time, he was in charge of both Maryland’s substantial holdings of East Asian- language books, periodicals and newspapers and its Gordon W. Prange Collection of published and unpublished Japanese-language works from the first four years (1945-1949) of the Allied Occupation of Japan. The latter is a special research collection. Bureaucratically treated as CCD file copies in Tokyo when they were received for examination by the Civil Censorship Detachment, General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (CCD, GHQ, SCAP) during the first four years (1945-1949) of the Allied Occupation of Japan, they consist of a vast array of books, magazines, newspapers, wall newspapers (kabe shinbun), news photographs, news service dispatches (tsushin), pamphlets, political posters, maps, documents, and other types of published and unpublished materials almost entirely in Japanese. This collection has become internationally known among Japanese and Western scholars alike.
By serving not only in these two positions and contributing in multiple ways to the Libraries’ development but also by working on his own or with the Association for Asian Studies for many additional hours each week, Frank concurrently led two professional careers: as a bibliographer and editor in Asian Studies continuously from 1969 onwards and as a university librarian at Maryland for twenty-five of these years.
Frank is known for his deep interest in and personal commitment to the enhancement of both scholarly research and broader public knowledge about Asia. His professional career affirms his interest in and commitment to the advancement of Asian Studies, especially through the collection, provision, and dissemination of information on Asia together with its bibliographical control. All together these activities have constituted the underlying motivation for his pursuit of this specialized line of work and for his various initiatives and accomplishments during his lifetime.
Among his many publications are:
- Japan and Korea: An Annotated Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations in Western Languages, 1877-1969. Compiled and edited for the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. Chicago: American Library Association; London: Frank Cass, 1970. xix, 340p.
Multidisciplinary, annotated, classified and indexed bibliography of 2,562 dissertations accepted by institutions of higher learning throughout the world.
- Doctoral Dissertations on China: A Bibliography of Studies in Western Languages, 1945-1970. By Leonard H.D. Gordon and Frank J. Shulman. Seattle and London: Published for the Association for Asian Studies by the University of Washington Press, 1972. xix, 317p. (Association for Asian Studies, Reference Series, 1)
- The Allied Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952: An Annotated Bibliography of Western-Language Materials. By Robert E. Ward and Frank Joseph Shulman, prepared with the assistance of Masashi Nishihara and Mary Tobin Espey and with important contributions by others at the University of Michigan. Compiled and edited for the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council–American Council of Learned Societies and the Center for Japanese Studies of the University of Michigan. Foreword by John Richardson, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State. Chicago: American Library Association, 1974. xx, 867p.
- East Asian Resources in American Libraries. By Teresa S. Yang, Thomas C. Kuo, and Frank Joseph Shulman. New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1977. ix, 143p.
- Japan. Oxford, England: Clio Press; Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 1989. xix, 873p. (World bibliographical series, vol.103).
Annotated, multidisciplinary and indexed guide to some 1,900 popular and scholarly books about Japan written in English particularly between the 1960s and the 1980s.
- Doctoral Dissertations on China and on Inner Asia, 1976-1990: An Annotated Bibliography of Studies in Western Languages. By Frank Joseph Shulman with contributions by Patricia Polansky and Anna Leon Shulman. Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1998. xxviii, 1,055p. (Bibliographies and indexes in Asian studies, no.2).
Multidisciplinary, descriptively annotated, classified and indexed bibliography of 10,290 dissertations.
- Doctoral Dissertations on Hong Kong, 1900-1997: An Annotated Bibliography. With an Appendix of Dissertations Completed in 1998 and 1999 = Guan yu Xianggang zhi bo shi lun wen zhu shi shu mu: 1900 zhi 1997. By Frank Joseph Shulman and Anna Leon Shulman. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001. xxxvii, 823p. (University of Hong Kong Libraries publications, no.12).
Multidisciplinary, descriptively annotated, classified and extensively indexed guide to 2,395 dissertations
- Mid-Atlantic Directory to Resources for Asian Studies. Prepared by the Committee on Academic Resources, Mid-Atlantic Region/Association for Asian Studies. Archie R. Crouch, Editor; Frank Joseph Shulman, Assistant Editor. Washington, D.C.: Mid-Atlantic Region/Association for Asian Studies, 1980. viii, 145p.
- “The First Century of Doctoral Dissertations on Korea, 1903-2004: An Annotated Bibliography of Studies in Western Languages Concerned in Their Entirety or in Part with Korea Accompanied by Notes about the Academic Backgrounds and Master’s Theses of Many of the Authors”. A multivolume reference work of nearly 15,000 entries that is currently in an advanced stage of preparation for publication.
A comprehensive bibliography of Frank’s publications and unpublished writings is available on request (Email: fshulman@umd.edu).
