Cornelius Kubler Awarded Faculty World Fellowship

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 21, 2003–Williams College has announced that Cornelius Kubler, the Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies, has been awarded a Faculty World Fellowship.

With the fellowship, Kubler will be able to complete a new basic Chinese language course, including text, audiotapes, videotapes, CD-ROMs, and a website. The course has been taught over the last several years in draft form in Chinese 101-102, an introductory Chinese course at Williams. An earlier version of his course received the Grand Prize of $5,000 in the Tuttle Language Grant competition for new Asian language textbooks in 1999.

Kubler will revise and expand several hundred pages of grammatical and cultural notes, as well as consult with Taipei and Beijing scholars on details of the grammatical analysis.

In his travels to China, he uses the time to bring the cultural and multi-media components of his courses up-to-date, recording dialogs between native Chinese speakers or filming segments of every day life.

“The ultimate rationale of this course,” said Kubler, “will be to improve communication between Americans and the citizens of the Chinese-speaking countries and to contribute, in however small a way, toward promoting peace and understanding between our peoples.”

Kubler served as chair of the Chinese, and later, Asian studies departments at Williams from 1991 to 1996 and from 1997 to 1999. Before coming to Williams in 1991, he served as chair of Asian and African Languages at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State (1988 to 1991).

Kubler has taught at the National Taiwan Normal University, was principal of the American Institute in Taiwan Chinese Language and Area Studies School (1981 to 1987), and worked as a scientific linguist in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Mongolian for the Foreign Service Institute.

He has written or co-written seven books and about 40 articles on linguistics and foreign language pedagogy.

Kubler received his M.A. in linguistics from Cornell University in 1975, an M.A. in Chinese literature from National Taiwan University in 1978, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell University in 1981.

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Published February 21, 2003