Professor of History, Asian Studies and Philosophy
Penn State University, USA

On-cho Ng

Teaching Chinese, Internationalizing Curricula, and Huayu Best: Reflections on the Penn State Experience
The talk is at once a retrospective review of the Chinese language program's collaboration with Huayu Best at Penn State, and a prospective strategizing of curricular amelioration and enrichment in light of the resources available and proffered. At the same time that it is a recapitulation of on-the-ground pedagogical actions in a specific institutional setting, it ruminates on the larger issues of the teaching and learning of Chinese as a form of intercultural hermeneutics and transnational congress that engenders cultural understanding.
Dr. On-cho Ng is Professor of History, Asian Studies and Philosophy and former Head of Asian Studies. He specializes in the intellectual history of late imperial China. Apart from Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing: Li Guangdi and Qing Learning (2001), and Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (2005), he has edited several volumes, and published dozens of book chapters and articles in a variety of academic periodicals, including Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Chinese Religions, Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Journal of World History. He is completing a book on Qing Thought as a Period Concept: Intellectual Trends in Late Imperial China” and is also working on the jinwen (New Script) classical commentaries in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. Dr. Ng serves as Associate Editor and Book Review Editor with the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and sits on the editorial board of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy.