CHR Summer Faculty Funding Award Recipient Talks: Jianfei Chen and Sayed Elsisi

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Hybrid- Horizon Hall 6325 and Zoom

Congratulations to these faculty members, who each received a competitive $3,500 CHR research grant to carry out humanities research during summer 2025!

 

Jianfei Chen (Instructional Associate Professor in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages), "Advancing Pragmatic Competence in Chinese through Theatrical Texts: A Practitioner Inquiry on 'The Thunderstorm'"

Project- The study tackles advanced Chinese learners’ difficulties in deriving contextual inferences from literary texts, often resulting in culturally shallow interpretations. Focusing on The Thunderstorm by Cao Yu, it merges pragmatic inferential strategies with pedagogy to unite literary analysis and language learning. Through practitioner inquiry (Lytle & Cochran-Smith, 1992), the project analyzes Spring 2025 classroom data (student reflections, discussions) alongside archives from four prior semesters. It aims to create a framework for teaching implicit meaning in high-context dialogues, illustrating how dramatic texts foster culturally nuanced communication. By bridging literary pragmatics and classroom practice, the study advances L2 pedagogy for advanced learners.

Sayed Elsisi (Assistant Professor, Arabic), "The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Rethinking the Interpretations of 'The Arabian Nights'"

Project- This is a chapter in a book project that presents a comprehensive scholarly examination of The Arabian Nights through innovative perspectives that challenge conventional readings. The project delves into the feminization of heroism, mystical dimensions of seemingly erotic narratives, comparative journey motifs across cultures, and the influence of the text's narrative structure on modern adaptations. Through meticulous textual analysis and interdisciplinary approaches, this research will provide valuable insights into one of world literature's most significant works, offering both academic rigor and cultural relevance for contemporary audiences. The examination of feminized heroism in The Arabian Nights offers a counternarrative to traditional Western heroic archetypes, highlighting how intelligence, storytelling, and moral education function as forms of heroism that challenge and transform patriarchal power structures. This analysis contributes to feminist literary criticism while illuminating often overlooked dimensions of female agency in classical texts.