Chinese Program

Faculty

Donghui He
Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Chinese
hed@whitman.edu
Olin Hall 333
(509) 527-5891

Professor He received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Before joining the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Whitman College in 2008, she had taught at Peking University, Vassar College, and the University of Tennessee, where she also served as the Chinese Program Coordinator. Her expertise is in modern and contemporary Chinese culture (literature, cinema, spoken drama, and Chinese cultural diaspora), comparative literature, genre studies, eco-criticism, critical theory, language philosophy, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy. Professor He has written on Chinese eco-cinema, Sino-Soviet cultural connections, reception aesthetics, 20th century Chinese cultural reconstructions, Chinese intellectual mainstream, and avant-gardism. She is currently completing a book project that explores representations of the natural landscape in Chinese public culture.

Qiulei Hu 
Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Chinese
huq@whitman.edu
Olin Hall 337
(509) 527- 5742

Professor Qiulei Hu specializes in early medieval Chinese poetry, with a particular focus on gender issues and the tradition of male writing in the feminine voice. Her dissertation, “Gender and Voice in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry,” discusses how poetic expressions about women and female gender markers were established and stabilized in the period from 3rd to 6th century. Born and raised in China, Professor Hu has been fascinated with classical Chinese literature and culture since her childhood. After getting both her B.A. and M.A. from the department of Chinese language and literature at Peking University, she came to Harvard University to pursue her doctoral degree in Chinese poetry, which she received in May, 2011. Professor Hu has a broad range of scholarly and teaching interests. In additional to her specialty, she also studies and teaches in fields such as Chinese language, traditional Chinese fiction, late imperial literature, women’s literature, as well as East Asian civilizations. She is currently working on a journal article on the Classic of Poetry, the earliest poetry collection in Chinese history.

Wencui Zhao
Adjunct Instructor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Chinese
zhaow@whitman.edu
Olin Hall 331
(509) 526-4786

Wencui Zhao received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from Peking University in Beijing, China, and her M.A. in English Literature from Yunnan University in Kunming. She has taught all levels of English language courses to undergraduate students at Yunnan University over the course of more than seventeen years there.  She then served as the Chinese Native Speaker at Whitman for the 2001-2002 academic year, and as a sabbatical replacement in the 2003-2004 academic year.  She has been an adjunct instructor at Whitman since 2007, and has taught all levels of Chinese language courses.  Wencui has additionally been involved in the Whitman in China Program, as well as the Whitman Summer Studies in China Program since it first launched in the summer of 2001.

 Native Speaker

Qu Jiangli (Catherine Qu) 

Native Speaker 2012-2013
quj@whitman.edu
Language Learning Center, Olin 316
(509) 527-5856

Catherine holds a master’s degree in applied linguistic and has taught English at Northwestern Polytechnical University for the past ten years.  Additionally, she has experience working as a tour guide and also as a tutor for foreign students learning Chinese.  Besides her passion for teaching, Catherine’s many interests include reading novels, embroidery, and singing.

Lunar New Year Celebration

On February 3, 2011, the Chinese faculty, Chinese Native Speaker, and a large group of students celebrated the Year of the Rabbit in the Language Learning Center. We had food, hong baos, riddles, calligraphy, paper cutting, mahjong, and CCTV's televised New Year's Gala. Click here to see a youtube video of clips from our celebration.