People
The East Asian Languages & Cultures program at UMass Amherst consists of teaching and research faculty, language-teaching faculty, research-only scholars, visiting scholars from other universities abroad, and adjunct associated faculty. The first two categories make up the core faculty of sixteen members.
Currently, the Chinese and Japanese languages programs have approximately 90 undergraduate majors, many more minors, and roughly 20 MA graduate students. In an attempt to educate the campus about Asia in general and East Asia in particular, we accommodate both the student body at large at the University of Massachusetts with various general education courses as well as our own majors and minors with smaller courses that focus on discussion and communication rather than lectures.
The East Asian Languages & Cultures faculty is a close-knit, friendly community of teacher-scholars that emphasizes the education of our students at all levels. Our students have gone on to graduate school in various fields of study and become professors; they have also found English-teaching jobs abroad, as well as jobs in business, publishing, government, and translation. In addition to its commitment to teaching, the faculty also publishes books and articles with leading academic presses and in well-known academic journals. The research and the publications of our faculty have resulted in fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Fulbright Scholar Program, an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, and an award from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
Photo: Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, Japan.