Jane Parish Yang, associate professor of Chinese, served as co-director of the four-year $1.5 million Freeman Foundation grant to enhance East Asian Studies at Lawrence. From 2001 to 2005, 82 individual faculty members from a variety of disciplines, including the Conservatory of Music, together with East Asian specialists on the faculty and 166 students from a variety of majors, traveled in small groups to East and Southeast Asia for nine- to 16-day study tours. The impact on the curriculum has been significant, she notes; returning faculty members have incorporated East Asian themes and perspectives into over 40 new or revised courses.
A translator of modern Chinese fiction, Professor Yang’s newest translation, Tall One and Short One: Children’s Stories, was published in October by Yuan-liou Press in Taipei, Taiwan, and already is in its second printing. Besides teaching beginning and intermediate Chinese and advanced readings in Chinese, she offers courses on classical and modern Chinese literature and East Asian classics in translation.
She has a paper, “‘The Tao is Up’ – Intertextuality and Cultural Dialogue in Tripmaster Monkey,” scheduled for publication in late 2005 in Reading Chinese Transnationalism: Society, Literature, and Film and recently has been invited to participate in two conferences, Current Pedagogical Approaches in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and the Asia in the Curriculum Symposium. In addition, she currently is researching poetic form in the 18th-century classic Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber.
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