Introducing SJI's Newly Elected President:

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As the Sino-Judaic Institute marks its 40th year in operation, it marks another milestone by electing its first female President.

Dr. Andrea Lingenfelter is a poet, literary translator, and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature. She received a BA in Chinese studies from Unviersity of California San Diego, an MA in East Asian Studies from Yale, and a PhD in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington. She currently teaches Literature and Film of the Asia Pacific, as well as Chinese to English translation, at the University of San Francisco, where she is also the managing editor of Asia Pacific Perspectives, an interdisciplinary journal of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies. 

Translations by Kenneth Rexroth and others, which she read as a high school student of creative writing, piqued her interest in classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. In college, she studied Japanese for two years before taking up the study of Mandarin. 

She first traveled to China in 1981, a trip that also took her and her classmates to Hong Kong and Taiwan. After graduating from college, she worked part-time at a university bookstore and accompanied groups of American tourists on budget tours of China. From 1984 to 1985 she taught English at Southwest China Teachers College, near Chongqing. Since then, she has returned to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan over a dozen times, and she has maintained close ties in the literary and arts communities of Shanghai, Chengdu, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. 

Her publications of translated fiction and poetry include The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (a Northern California Book Award winner); Farewell My Concubine by Lilian Lee; Candy by Mian Mian; and The Kite Family and Other Stories by Hon Lai Chu (awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship). Her translations of contemporary poetry, fiction, and prose have been published widely. 

Dr. Lingenfelter and her family live in Berkeley, California.