The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University is honored to announce the establishment of the Tang Center for Early China. Early China was the fountainhead of Chinese civilization and provided the foundation for a common cultural heritage that has characterized much of the East Asian world. The ideas and institutions created in Early China had profound impact on the later developments of China and East Asia. The Tang Center is dedicated to the advancement of the understanding of the richness and significance of early Chinese civilizations through both solid scholarship and broad public outreach. [read more]

EALAC congratulates Li Feng on receiving the 2015 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, which honors exceptional faculty in the Arts and Sciences. The awards are given annually to recognize unusual merit across a range of activities including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement, with primary emphasis on teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.

Charles Armstrong, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, has received the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association for Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992. Professor Armstrong's book reveals for the first time the motivations, processes, and effects of North Korea's foreign relations during the Cold War era.

Theodore Hughes, the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Korean Research, has received the 2014 James B. Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier. Professor Hughes's book explores the ways in which Korean writers, artists and filmmakers represented colonialism and modernity during Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 and the ways in which the colonial experience informed Korean cultural production in the Cold War period.

Professor Eugenia Lean has received the 2013-2014 Faculty Mentoring Award for faculty in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC) instituted this award in 2004 to honor excellence in the mentoring of Ph.D. students. Eugenia Lean is a specialist in modern China history and the director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.