UW faculty dissect growing relationship with China
In forging connections with China, UW–Madison has created an international model for the university.
The Innovation Office in Shanghai has opened up new opportunities for students, faculty and leaders in business and government. From the Shanghai Seminar Series to a UW account on Sino Weibo, and from technology transfer to official state visits, Wisconsin and China are closer than ever before. Chinese students are now by far the university’s largest international group.
An upcoming panel of UW–Madison faculty will examine how this partnership with China is evolving and what it means for the future of the university and the student experience.
The UW–Madison Center for the Humanities will present “China in Madison/Madison in China,” a public panel to discuss the internationalization of the university, on Wednesday, Feb. 6, at 7 p.m. in the H.F. DeLuca Forum of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Panelists Leslie Bow, professor of English and former director of Asian American studies; Edward Friedman, professor of political science; Nicole Huang, professor of East Asian languages and literature and director of the Wisconsin China Initiative; and Zhongdang Pan, professor of communication arts, will be joined by Yoshiko Herrera, professor of political science and co-director of the International Institute, who will serve as moderator.
Panelists will examine the role of history, literature, social theory and communications in a blended cultural environment, and ask: What role do the humanities play in efforts to expand this university?
Topics up for discussion include: other instances when new groups of students came to campus (the welcome extended to Jewish students in the 1920s and 1930s, for example); issues of human rights and censorship, and how those might impact teaching and scholarship; and the vast opportunities for knowledge transfer (and not just in the areas of technology, but in history and the arts, among others).
The panel is free and open to the public. More information can be found here.
—Mary Ellen Gabriel
