Faculty-Discipline

Morris Rossabi

Morris Rossabi

Associate Adjunct Professor

Office Hours: T 9-10 AM
Email: mr63@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (’70)

Classes Taught

HSEA UN3898 The Mongols in History
HIST GR6999 Graduate Seminar – History of the Mongols

Research Interests

Asian History

Professor Rossabi is a historian of China and Central and Inner Asia. He teaches courses on Inner Asian, East Asian, and Chinese history at Columbia. During the 2008–2009 academic year, he received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Mongolia. He and Mary Rossabi are involved in an oral history of 20th and 21st century Mongolia, which has led to the publication of Socialist Devotees and Dissenters; A Herder, a Trader, and a Lawyer; and The Practice of Buddhism in Kharkhorin and its Revival (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 2010, 2012, and 2013).

Author or editor of 25 books, he has helped organize exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He was on the advisory board of the Project on Central Eurasia and Chair of the Arts and Culture Committee of the Soros Foundation. The author of numerous articles and speeches, he travels repeatedly to China, Central Asia, and Mongolia. In 2021, the Minister of Foreign Affairs awarded Professor Rossabi a Certificate of Merit at the Mongolian Embassy to the United Nations.

Selected Publications

The Mongols and Global History (W.W. Norton, 2010)

Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (University of California, 2005)

Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (University of California, 1988)

Shaoyan Qi

Shaoyan Qi

Senior Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 512 Kent Hall
Office Hours: M 12:00-1:00 pm
Phone: (212) 854-3604
Email: sq2106@columbia.edu

Educational Background

EdD: Applied Linguistics, Teachers College, Columbia University
MA: Education, Villanova University
MA: Linguistic and Socio-cultural Anthropology, State University of New York at Binghamton

Research Interests

Instructed Second Language Acquisition
Chinese Language Pedagogy
Task-Based Language Teaching

Shaoyan Qi has been teaching in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) at Columbia University since 2004. She has taught Chinese language courses at all levels, as well as linguistics courses at both Columbia and Teachers College. She is the lead author of the award-winning Discover China textbook series.

Her research is closely informed by her commitment to effective classroom practice and responsiveness to students’ learning needs. From 2008 to 2017, she also served as a teacher trainer in a certificate program at Teachers College. She approaches her work as a researcher, teacher, and teacher trainer as deeply interconnected.

Shaoyan served as a member of the Lecturer Advisory Committee (LAC) from 2022 to 2025 and as its Chair from 2024 to 2025. She is currently a lecturer representative on the Arts & Sciences Policy and Planning Committee (2025–2028).

Publications

S., Qi (In press). Implementing TBLT in an online Chinese class for beginners [Case Study], in Lambert C. (ed) Designing tasks for teaching foreign languages, Cambridge University Press.

S., Qi (2015). Introduction: Why should second/foreign language teachers tune in to instructed SLA? (2015). Working Papers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, 15 (2), pp. i-iv. Teacher’s College, Columbia University: New York

S., Qi & Q. Tan (2014). Discover China, Book IV. Macmillan: Hong Kong

S., Qi (2013). Discover China, Book III.  Macmillan: Hong Kong

S., Qi & J., Zhang (2012). Discover China, Book II. Macmillan: Hong Kong

S. Qi (2011). Computer-assisted second language teaching, learning, and research. Working Papers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, 11 (2), pp. 27-28. Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Book Contribution Chinese Grammar Made Easy—A practical and effective guide for teachers (Yale University Press, 2008)

Ying Qian

ying_qianYing Qian

Director of Undergraduate Studies, Associate Professor

Office: Kent 607
Office Hours: Friday 3-5pm or by appointment

Phone: (212)854-5027
Email: yq2189@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Harvard University
MPhil: University of Cambridge, UK
PhD: Harvard University (’13)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3322 East Asian Cinema
EAAS GU4572 Chinese Documentary Cinema
EAAS GR8998 Media Cultures in China

Research Interests

Chinese-language cinema and media; transnational media histories; media of activism, reform and critique; media ecology and knowledge formation

As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media
and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms
of experience. Her first book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media
in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024) excavates
documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary
movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political
campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches
documentary as an “eventful medium,” and as a prism to examine the mutual
constitution of media and revolution: how revolutionary movements gave
rise to specific media practices, and how these media practices in turn
contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. This book has
won the Lionel Trilling Book Award from Columbia College, and the Best
Book in Journalism History Award from the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC),and the Honorable Mention for Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies. Ying Qian’s articles have
appeared in positions: asia critique, Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, China
Perspectives, New Literary History of Modern China, Oxford Handbook of
Chinese Cinemas, and other journals and websites. She is also the co-editor
(with Nicholas Bartlett) of a special issue, Neng 能and China’s Long 1980s
(positions: asia critique, 33.3 August 2025). At Columbia, she teaches classes
on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of
science and technology, and comparative media theory and history. Drawing
from her experiences in filmmaking, she has incorporated creative
assignments in her classes, guiding students to try their hands on media
productions.

Selected Publications

“The Rise of the Brain: Envisioning Human Potential in 1980s China” (single-authored), and
“Neng and China’s 1980s: a Reevaluation” (co-authored with Nicholas Bartlett), in Nicholas Bartlett and Ying Qian eds., Neng 能 and China’s Long 1980s (special issue), 
positions: asia critique v. 33, no. 3, August 2025.

Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia
University Press, 2024)

“When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap
Forward”, Critical Inquiry (Spring 2020).

“The Spectre of Liu Shaoqi,” in A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017)
“Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets, and the Reconstruction of an Activist Cinema,”
in China’s iGeneration: Filmmakers, Films and Audiences in a New Media Age (Continuum,
2014)

“Power in the Frame: Independent Documentary in China,” The New Left Review (2012)