On 16th April at 11:00 o'clock on the occasion of International Chinese Language Day, we kindly invite you to participate in the lecture, which will be delivered by our esteemed colleague Dr. Lu Xiaohong from our partner university – East China Normal University.
Chinese characters (汉字 Hànzì) are fundamental to understanding Chinese culture due to their deep historical roots, symbolic nature, and role in shaping thought and communication. The Chinese script is far more than a writing system — it’s a cultural archive that implicitly encodes philosophy, aesthetics, and even architectural principles. In this presentation, the speaker will explore how Chinese script and architecture reflect the Chinese worldview where form, function, and cosmology are inseparable, by decoding some characters related to architecture like “门 (gate/door)”, “院 (courtyard)”, “宫 (palace)”, “堂 (hall)”, “室 (room)”, “园 (garden)” etc.
The speaker – Dr. Lu Xiaohong is an associate professor at the School of International Chinese Studies at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. She is the supervisor for the master's program of International Chinese Education and the administrative director at the Institute of Global Chinese Language Teacher Education at the school. Her teaching and research interests include Teacher Professional Development, Teaching Chinese/English as a Second Language, Cross-cultural Communication, Chinese Language and Culture, etc.
She was a visiting scholar at New York University from 2006 to 2007, then at St. Olaf College in 2009. She taught Chinese language and culture in the U.S from 2012-2016 and in Belgium from 2018-2020.
We kindly invite you to join the online lecture. The link will be available on the day of the event.
The lecture will be held in English.