English Professors Gather at Tsinghua for IAUPE Triennial Conference 2013

IAUPE Triennial Conference 2013

The International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE) Triennial Conference was held in Tsinghua University, Beijing from July 16 to 20, 2013. Over one hundred professors from seventy universities representing twenty countries participated in the conference. It is the first time that the conference has been held in Asia in its 62-years history

Xie Weihe, Vice President of Tsinghua University, Ian Kirby, Secretary General of IAUPE, and Jewel Spears Brooker, Chair of the International Committee attended the opening ceremony. Cao Li, director of European and American Literatures, Tsinghua University, and co-president of IAUPE, presided over the proceedings. In her opening remarks, she informed the audience about the background of holding the IAUPE triennial conference in China. Cao Li attributed the debut to the initiative efforts of several pioneers of English Studies in China such as Yuan Heh-Hsiang and Qian Qing and to the increasingly active engagement of Chinese scholars in global academic exchanges. A Professor of English at Tsinghua with a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge, Cao Li spoke highly of the heritage of English Studies at Tsinghua University:

"When I. A. Richards, followed by William Empson, came all the way from Cambridge, England to Tsinghua, China to teach English literature and practical criticism one century ago, he claimed himself as the link and ambassador between two cultures. All of us who are present today witnessing the opening of the IAUPE conference 2013 in Beijing are one link or another between different languages and cultures. "

In her welcoming speech at the ceremony, Jin Li, the vice-president of Beijing Foreign Studies University, also co-president of the IAUPE noted the popularity of English in China and spoke highly of the role IAUPE played in China's study and research of English. According to Jin, it is estimated that China has over 300 million English learners at present, and in Chinese higher education, English language and literature are among the biggest and most important academic disciplines.

"Almost every Chinese university and college offers English as an academic program, and currently there are over 400,000 college students majoring in English," according to Jin, who is also an English professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Jewel Spears Brooker, chair of the International Committee of IAUPE expressed her gratitude to Tsinghua University and Beijing Foreign Studies University for hosting the conference in China. She said that by the time the participants had visited the Great Wall, they would have dismantled some cultural walls and constructed some bridges.

The famous Guqin player Jia-an Li played "Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank" and the Tsinghua University Faculty Choir sang "A Moonlit Night on the Spring River" in Chinese and "Italian Salad" in Italian at the opening ceremony. The performance was a perfect complement for the themes and atmosphere of the conference. Like the song “Italian Salad”, the conference was an ensemble of ideas and dialogues between professors of English from different countries and cultures.

There were four plenary speakers:  (1) Sir Christopher Ricks, William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, (2) Heh-Hsiang YUAN, Hsieh Tung-ming Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Soochow University, (3) Dana Gioia, American poet and professor at the University of Southern California, and (4) Professor Wen Qiufang, Director of the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education. Their speeches, which were entitled (1) “It is, however, the Task of Criticism to Establish Principles”, (2) “From Both Ends of the Looking-Glass: English Literature in a Non-English Culture”, (3) “Poetry as Enchantment”, and (4) “English as a Lingua Franca for International Communication”, inspired the audience with fresh ideas and insights.

The conference featured 16 sections in 34 parallel sessions covering a wide range of topics including: Old English Language and Literature, Early Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature, British Romanticism, Modern British Literature, Early American Literature, American Literature after 1900, Literary Theory, The History of English, Lexical Semantics and Bibliography and Textual Studies. The special session on “English Studies in China,” convened by Professor Chen Yongguo of Tsinghua University and Professor Zhang Jian of Beijing Foreign Studies University, were actively joined by scholars from home and abroad.

As a normal practice of the triennial conference, a dozen of medievalists gathered for a pre-conference Medieval Symposium at Beijing Foreign Studies University from July 12 to 14 , 2013.

Tsinghua University and Beijing Foreign Studies University co-hosted the conference in collaboration with the Research Center for European and American Literatures of Peking University, the School of Foreign Languages and Literature of Beijing Normal University, the School of Foreign Languages of Renmin University of China, and the Tsinghua University Press.

Before and during the conference, Sir Christopher Ricks, Yuan Heh-Hsiang, and Dana Gioia gave lectures to students at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, which were warmly received by students and faculties from Tsinghua and other universities around Beijing.

IAUPE is a global association of scholars and teachers dedicated to the study of English in all its facets. The fundamental purpose of IAUPE is to look after “English” all over the world. It was formed shortly after the Second World War with the idea of getting senior representatives of English as an academic subject together. The Association flourished, and currently has approximately 500 members, spread over six continents, with more than ten of them from China. Since the first (preparatory) conference at Oxford University in 1950, it has held 22 triennial conferences. The three most recent conferences have taken place in Lund (2007), Malta (2010) and Beijing (2013). On 20 July 2013, members present at the assembly held at Jin Chun Yuan, Tsinghua University, voted to accept King’s College, University of London, to be the host of the next triennial conference in 2016.

Tsinghua University pioneered English teaching and research in China, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s when I. A. Richards and William Empson lectured here on English literature and literary criticism. Many of their students, including Qian Zhongshu, Yang Zhouhan, Wang Zuoliang, Zhou Jueliang and Li Funing, later became leading scholars of English language and literature in China, and their students have now become active members of the association and organizers of the Beijing triennial conference.