Faculty
Dr. Yi-Chia Chen is a senior instructor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences. He regularly offers geography courses at International College Beijing in Beijing, China. His research explores the meanings of landscape changes in China from a perspective of cultural geography. He enjoys traveling with study-abroad students in his co-teaching course to study geography along the Yangtze.
Professor Jeffrey Golub specializes in Ancient Philosophy and works in the areas of German Idealism, Phenomenology, and 19th-20th Century Continental Philosophy. Dr. Golub teaches courses in the history of philosophy, social/political thought, ethics, aesthetics, and logic. In addition to the Denver campus, he lectures at the International College in Beijing, China, where he has been pursuing an interest in comparative philosophies of eastern and western traditions and classical Chinese philosophy in particular.
Professor Gao is a historian of modern China. She specializes in social and labor history, gender, and environmental history. She teaches a broad range of history courses on China, East Asia, and the relationship between China and the world.
Professor Jia Jia is a lecturer in Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages.
Professor Tracy Wang is a lecturer in Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages.
Dr.Yang Wang is an Assistant Professor of Art History. She teaches courses on the arts of China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. As a proponent of experiential and international education, she enjoys organizing field trips for her classes and serving on the campus committee for the Fulbright program. Her research focuses on the role of Chinese art in establishing postwar global modernism, and has been supported by Fulbright, ACLS, Getty, American Oriental Society, and P.E.O. International. Her writings have been published in ARTMargins, Yishu–Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art Issue, Modern Art Asia, and by the National Museum of Korea and the Denver Art Museum. Her curatorial projects on contemporary Chinese ink arts, Asian American art, and contemporary Korean art represent her broader research interests in visual culture, neotraditionalism, collective practice, nationalism, and Cold War transnationalism
My scholarship in children’s geographies is multidisciplinary and socio-spatial in nature. Specifically, my research focuses on children’s place attachments, using visual narratives to understand and validate their lived experience. I do this to promote greater inclusivity in urban planning and education. I question embedded cultural norms and expectations that shape who we are and how we inhabit spaces. For example, how does the language and discourse of childhood frame child-place interactions? What does this mean for the felt geography of places and the unique ways by which people, particularly children, develop place attachments? Why does this matter in the context of social and environmental equity/sustainability? Visual narratives, for example drawings, digital stories and emotion maps, help me address these questions in ways that deepen our appreciation for diverse worldviews and nurtures empathy in the research process. I consider the following to be core elements of a humanistic pedagogy: to teach is to understand self in relation to others, to teach is to cultivate humility and compassion, to teach is to learn. I embrace these focal points of my identity to support critical thought and collaborative dialogue in my classes, always striving to be wholly present in mind, body and spirit. Teaching is both a science and an art. It is informed by learning theories, but its practice involves a passion and perspective that is deeply personal. I hope to keep an open mind to learning as well as a willing heart for teaching. As Walt Whitman so aptly described in Leaves of Grass, "wisdom is not finally tested in schools, wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, wisdom is of the soul."