Prof Joseph LAU Shiu-Ming 劉紹銘教授

Award

Doctor of Literature honoris causa 榮譽文學博士學位

Year of Award

2018

Biography

Professor Joseph LAU Shiu-Ming is a renowned scholar in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, an educator, a translator and a writer. He is dedicated to the preservation, transmission and study of modern Chinese literature and has made enormous contributions to the field of translation and cross-cultural transmission.

Prof Lau taught at Miami University, the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and University of Hawaii in the U.S., the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore, and was a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia and Freie Universität Berlin. He joined the then Lingnan College as Visiting Professor of the Department of Chinese, and was later appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Chair Professor of Translation. He later served as the Head of the Department of Chinese at Lingnan University and was named Emeritus Professor after his retirement in 2004.

Prof Lau is committed to cross-cultural transmission and the spread of Chinese literature. He has edited and translated a wide range of publications including The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature (co-edited with Howard Goldblatt, 1995) and Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations, vol. I: from Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty (co-edited with John Minford, 2000), which rank, in their own domains, among the most comprehensive English-language anthologies of Chinese literature in the Western academia. Some of his works have also been adopted in the U.S. undergraduate Chinese literature curriculum. In addition, Prof Lau is devoted to creative writing. Under the pen name “Er Can” (Second Wreck), he published on newspapers of Hong Kong and Taiwan a great variety of articles, which are distinguished by humorous style.

For his remarkable academic achievements and outstanding contributions to cultural transmission, Prof Lau has received recognition from various organisations, including the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Rockefeller Foundation, Pacific Cultural Foundation, the Council for Cultural Planning & Development (under Executive Yuan) and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

Prof Lau was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa by Lingnan University.