School of Humanities

The School of Humanities was established in January, 2010 based on the former School of Chinese Language & Literature, School of Education and School of Arts of Jiangnan University. It is one of the most important reform measures taken by the university to adapt to the development trend of higher education and the social demand for talents, aiming to optimize allocation of resources, intensify interdisciplinary integration and build up top humanity disciplines. This comprehensive liberal art school possesses three first class disciplines: Education, Chinese Language and Literature, and Art. It consists of six departments (Department of Chinese, Department of Education, Department of Educational Technology, Department of Audiovisual Communications, Department of Music and Department of Dance), three centers (Teaching Experiment and Practice Center, Principals and Teachers Training Center, Test Center for Language Proficiency and Teaching Competence), two research institutes (Tin Ka Ping Education Science Institute and Jiangnan Liberal Art Institute) and one education base (National Undergraduate Cultural Quality Education Base). All these units contribute to the formation of this talent training base, which is an integration of education, literature and art.

The school has preliminarily formed an education system with postgraduate education playing the leading role and undergraduate education as the main body. There are three master programs: Ancient Chinese Literature, Comparative Literature and World Literature, and Education Principles; six undergraduate programs: Chinese Language and Literature, Education Science (teacher preparation), Education Technology (teacher preparation), Drama, Movie and TV Literature, Musicology (teacher preparation), and Choreography. There are currently about 2000 students in undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

The school has an outstanding faculty with strong scientific and technological innovation capability. In recent years, it has obtained 3 National Social Science Fund projects and more than 40 national, provincial and ministerial projects, published more than 300 high-quality academic papers and about 50 academic works, and won 3 provincial teaching achievement awards. The choreographic work named Qiang Shan Hong (Red Over Qiang Mountain) won the Splendor Award from China’s Ministry of Culture. The humanity series Shuo Wu, written by teachers from Drama, Movie and TV Literature, was awarded one of the top ten in the Sixth China’s International Documentary Contest. The school has a strong and well-structured faculty, among which 105 are full-time, including 18 professors and 32 associate professors. Teachers with senior qualifications take up 48% of the whole group of full-time teachers. The school has formed academic teams led by outstanding academic leaders, with high research and teaching capability.

Upholding the reliable educational tradition of Jiangnan University formed in the past hundred years, the school lays stress on cultivating humanities and social sciences qualities, sticks to the university motto “learning and practice to perfection”, and strengthens the construction of teaching quality project. At present, it has set up one National Excellent Course and 3 Provincial Excellent Courses, and acquires many projects of National-level Planned Textbooks, Provincial-level Excellent Textbooks, National University Student Innovation Experimental Programs, Provincial University Student Innovation Training Programs, etc.

The school has rich accumulation of cultures with abundant teaching resources and China’s first-class teaching hardware and facilities. Now it has about 40,000 books and reference materials, teaching equipment worth over 10 million yuan and advanced experimental facilities like the Multimedia Lab, the Networks Lab, the Artificial Intelligence Lab, the TV Production Lab, the TV Studio, the Vocal Lab, the Digital Office Lab, the Journalism and Communication Lab, the Photography Lab, the Psychology Lab, the Acrobatics Hall, the Piano Room, the Microteaching, etc. They provide a good environment for its disciplinary construction and talent training.

In accordance with the principle of “emphasizing optimization, improving quality, raising standards and highlighting characteristics”, the School of Humanities will take personnel training as the basic task, teaching and researching as the central task and disciplinary construction as the leading task. It will energetically explore the way of innovation and development of humanities and make efforts to build a high-level school of humanities with solid humanitarian foundation, considerable interdisciplinary advantage and prominent education characteristics.

Dean: Professor CHEN Mingxuan