Rachel Chung

Rachel E. Chung, recipient of the coveted five-year Tang Research Grant in 2016, is Lecturer in Disciplines in the Department.  For many years the Director of University Committee on Asia & the Middle East (UCAME) at Columbia University, she worked closely with Wm. Theodore de Bary to develop and implement new Global Core courses that span East Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Western civilizations, such as Nobility & Civility I and II, and Nature & Human Nature I and II.  As Director she was also instrumental in reaching out to the community of leading colleges and universities around the world to build international consensus and cooperation for global core curricula, including with Chinese Association for Liberal Education and its cohort of over 400 higher education institutions in China.  With research interests primarily in Neo-Confucian cultural and intellectual history as well as pedagogy of interculturation, as Lecturer in both Music and EALAC she developed such new Global Core courses as Friendship in Asian & Western Civilizations and Ritual & Music in East Asian Traditions, as well as taught Asian Humanities, Asian Music Humanities, Masterpieces of Western Music, and Intro to Major Topics in East Asian Civilizations. She received her B.M. and M.M. degrees from the Juilliard School in New York, and her M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. in Historical Musicology and East Asian Languages & Cultures from Columbia University in 2002. Having published numerous articles, including the "Song of Ch'unhyang" for Wisdom in East Asian Classics, she is currently working on two books, titled Interculturation and Global Core Curricula based on her work at UCAME, and Song Hyon's "Model for Study of Music": A Culminating Treatise of Neo-Confucian Political Philosophy.