Mao leaves English Department grad program at the top of its class
By Allison Stevens
LuMing Mao has a 17-year history at Miami, and a history of leaving things better than he found them. This time he’s left the English Department graduate program a better place.
Mao spent his three-year term as the Director of Graduate Studies for the English department strengthening and revising the program—and not without impressing his colleagues. The English Department chair, Kerry Powell, was so pleased with Mao’s work that he asked him to continue his job for an extra semester to complete the university-wide graduate program review in the fall. His hard work paid off: the English graduate program was recently ranked the number one graduate program at Miami based on caliber of students, faculty, and program mission. The Composition and Rhetoric Ph.D. program was also recently ranked top 10 in the nation for faculty research productivity.
“LuMing Mao’s term as Director of Graduate Studies has been extraordinary,” says Powell. “He has led the way in internationalizing our graduate program, successfully recruiting top students from China and elsewhere to raise our commitment to ethnic and racial diversity to a new level. Especially important to me is his informal role as a great friend and adviser to the Chair!”
Mao’s interest in and involvement with the English language was an unlikely scenario; he grew up speaking Chinese in his hometown of Shanghai and only learned English when he was 10 or 11 years old. He came to the United States with a scholarship to study here and he earned a master’s and a Ph.D. in English Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 1991, he joined the English Department at Miami.
In addition to his term as Director of Graduate Studies, Mao has taught a wide variety of graduate and undergraduate courses about comparative rhetoric, non-Western rhetorical traditions, linguistics and pragmatics in his time here.
“I became interested in this particular area largely because I have always been fascinated by how we humans use language …and how rhetoric can help reduce misunderstanding and enhances chances for finding common ground,” says Mao.
The ability to fuse his Chinese heritage with his interest in rhetoric recently paid off on a national scale. Mao was the 2007 recipient of the Richard Ohmann Award—which recognizes the article in the past volume year of the journal College English “that makes the most significant contribution to scholarship, research, theory or pedagogy in English Studies”—for his article “Studying the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition in the Present: Re-presenting the Native’s Point of View.” Honors of this caliber can easily inflate one’s ego, but Mao’s remains graciously intact.
“It sounds somewhat cliché-like, but I did feel both honored and humbled,” he says. “Honored because my peers chose to honor me with this prestigious award and humbled because I know there were other colleagues who were just as worthy as I was.”
Mao’s commitment to international diversity doesn’t stop at the articles he writes or at what he’s already done for the English Department. In addition to recruiting individual international students, he’s developing a faculty and graduate student exchange with several Chinese universities. And his new project at Miami is launching an Asian/Asian American Studies program. It’s a goal that Mao has had for a while and started pursuing on his own initiative.
“This was really a bottom-up project, one that the university now fully supports and one that responds to its core mission,” says Mao. “What drove me and a group of us—without whose support, it must be stated, I don't think I would have gone this far—is what such a program like Asian/Asian American Studies can offer to students and faculty alike at Miami at this particular moment in history.”
Mao and his colleagues feel that such a program will enhance Miami students’ educational experiences by broadening their cultural perspectives and helping them understand how their views about Asians and Asian Americans are shaped. He also feels it will help Miami achieve the goals of the newly reformatted Global Miami Plan.
“Given the increasingly diverse body of Miami students, with an ever-increasing number of them coming from Asia, including China and India, this program will help the university to respond to their needs and interests, and it will further enhance the core mission of the university,” says Mao. “I do expect a lot of interest from our students, including students from the Farmer School of Business’s China Program.”
Creating a completely new program is a daunting task, but one that Mao hopes to have launched by next fall with core courses and one or two thematic sequences. Within the next three to five years, a full curriculum, major, and minor should be in place.
As if that weren’t enough, within the next few years Mao will be writing a new book on comparative rhetoric, traveling to China to deliver several invited talks, and continuing his work with Miami graduates and undergraduates in different capacities—although no longer Director of Graduate Studies, he’ll still be a part of the English Department faculty.
“I have grown a lot at Miami both as a teacher and a researcher,” he says. “It has been a memorable journey.”
One that is far from finished.