Faculty News

Feb. 9, 2026, 5:30 p.m. Location: Taylor 203, Vassar College

"The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Rethinking the Interpretations of 'The Arabian Nights'"

"Advancing Pragmatic Competence in Chinese through Theatrical Texts: A Practitioner Inquiry on 'The Thunderstorm'"

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, and Grok are increasingly used by university students, yet they face fundamental limitations. In second-language learning, chatbots struggle to match the nuance and communicative intent of human language. While prompt engineering, RAG, and local LLMs allow some customization, true personalization—grounded in students’ voices, needs, and goals—remains out of reach. AI support is largely limited to remedial practice and explanations, and even these can be unreliable or dull.

Professor Luo’s 2014 research monograph, The Avan-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (University of Michigan Press), has recently been published in Chinese by the prestigious People’s Literature Press (October 2025).

Dr Peiyu Yang was awarded a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress

A review of Dr Peiyu Yang’s monograph Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of Post-colonial World between China- Europe, and the Middle East, 1880-1940 (2024) was recently published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

MCL and CS Forum # 10

Young A Jung, an assistant professor at George Mason University who teaches modern Korean literature and pop culture, said one factor behind the mass appeal of “KPop Demon Hunters” might be the complexity of its central characters, Rumi and Jinu.