People

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.

YI-CHIA.CHEN@UCDENVER.EDU

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.

Jeffrey.Golub@ucdenver.edu

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.

XIAOFEI.GAO@UCDENVER.EDU

Professor Jia Jia is a lecturer in Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages.

jia.jia.@ucdenver.edu

Professor Tracy Wang is a lecturer in Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages.

JINGKUNTRACY.WANG@UCDENVER.EDU

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

YANG.WANG@UCDENVER.EDU

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."

Bryan.Wee@ucdenver.edu

Director

Dr. Woo I-hao Victor Woo received his Ph.D. in linguistics at Boston University and is an assistant professor of Chinese. His research interests are on theoretical Chinese linguistics with a focus on syntax and semantics. He has also conducted research on topics related to Chinese for Specific Purposes (CSP) and Business Chinese.

Ph.D. Linguistics, Boston University, Boston.

M.A. Linguistics, San Diego State University, San Diego.

B.A. French, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Journal Articles

2022  "Pedagogical issues related to the adverb dou in Mandarin Chinese." Chinese as a Second Language Research, 11(1), pp. 61-90.

2021  “On the syntax of wan ‘finish/complete’ in Mandarin Chinese.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 41(4), pp. 408-433.

2021 “Pedagogical and Theoretical Issues of V-V Compound Construction in Mandarin Chinese.” International Journal of Chinese Language Teaching 2(1), pp. 17-33.

2021 “On preverbal zai in Mandarin Chinese: its progressive and prepositional functions.” Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences. 59(3): pp. 513–539

2018 “On the syntax of dynamic verbs in Mandarin Chinese.” Linguistics and Literature Studies 6(4), pp. 149-156.

2018 “On perfective -le in Mandarin Chinese: Theoretical and pedagogical issues.” Acta Linguistica Asiatic 8(2), pp. 131-151.

2015 “Aspectual coercion and the aspectual marker –zhe in Mandarin Chinese.” International Journal of Linguistics and Communication 3(2), pp. 119-134.

2015 “A contrastive analysis of the imperfective aspect in Chinese and English: Theoretical and pedagogical issues.” US-China Foreign Languages 13. pp. 652-662.

In Progress

(under review)  "On the aspectual values of gradable adjectival predicates in Mandarin Chinese."

(in prep.) "A corpus analysis of Novice Vietnamese CFL learners’ uses of classifiers and measure words." "

i-hao.woo@ucdenver.edu

Department of Modern Languages
University of Colorado Denver
Campus Box 178, PO Box 173364
Denver, CO 80217

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