Institute for World Literatures and Cultures Unveils
The opening ceremony of the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Tsinghua University was held on April 12，2016 as one of the celebrating activities meant to mark the 90th anniversary of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. Tsinghua University Council Chairperson Chen Xu attended the opening ceremony.
The Institute for World Literatures and cultures is a research institute engaged in both academic research and teaching activities. The Institute seeks to strike out a new way in understanding the world and introducing China to the international community. It aims at carving out intercultural and multilingual frontier researches, on the one hand, and cultivating global-minded talents with sound mastery of multilingual and cross-cultural knowledge and skills, on the other.
Chen Xu expressed her congratulations for the 90th anniversary of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the founding of the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures. Chen Xu said that the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures represents a new, bold move of Tsinghua University to push forward the comprehensive reform currently in progress and to strengthen both teaching and research in the field of humanities at Tsinghua.
Yan Haiping, director of the newly founded institute expressed her sincere hope that the students of the institute should equip themselves with a forward and open mentality by viewing themselves as successors of an academic tradition which combines global perspective with local particularity and takes the whole world as a community with a shared future.
In response to the world’s future trend of higher education, the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures will lay a special emphasis on equipping students with bilingual or multilingual capabilities of intercultural and international thinking and conversation. In 2015, an experimental class was jointly launched by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures. The first class made 10 recruitments, with a newly designed curriculum plus a 4-year long program for independent studies guided by senior professors. The curriculum includes core courses in liberal arts education and in Chinese and Western literature and thought. Being immersed in bona fide western classics and traditional Chinese learning from the very beginning, students will be trained with a bi-focus on both the traditional and the modern, the Chinese and the western, which forms the crucial part of the tradition in Tsinghua humanities.
The Institute for World Literatures and Cultures has already rallied a strong faculty team which is well steeped in literature, history, philosophy and foreign languages and literatures, including Yan Haiping, Wang Zhongshen, Chen Yongguo, Cao Li. Huang Yusheng, Liu Shi,and Peng Gang.
On the same day, the agreement on the establishment of The Tsinghua – Michigan Society of Fellows was jointly signed by Shi Yigong, Vice President of Tsinghua University and James Holloway, vice-provost for global affairs of Michigan University.
The purpose of TMSF is to promote advanced scholarly inquiry in humanities and social sciences in a collaborative intercultural setting and to enable academic exchanges and collaborations between the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures and the Michigan Society of Fellows, and to promote academic partnerships at every level between Tsinghua University and the University of Michigan. The primary function of the Society is to select and mentor a group of Fellows, outstanding recent PhD recipients in humanities and social sciences, and provide them with teaching experiences and research opportunities.
(By Li Huashan,Lily Cao, Hannah)
