CUSP Distinguished Speaker Series 2024-2025: Harmony

Harmony at Symposium: World Classics, Pedagogy, and Interculturation presented by Rachel Chung, Lecturer in Global Core & Music, Department of Music, Columbia University

Symposium is a student club at Columbia that takes Columbia’s ideal of the Core a step further, engaging students all over the world each year in the discussion of classics from three different civilizations as part of growing a movement themed “Classics for an Emerging World.” But perhaps even more importantly, Symposium uses these workshops on world classics as opportunities to build and engage in pedagogy (as distinct from teaching) and interculturation, experiencing what it is to embody harmony through diversity, and dismantling colonial mentality one self at a time. Please come join the conversation to think about how you can adapt these ideas in/for your own contexts.

Rachel E. Chung, Ph.D., recipient of the coveted Tang Research Grant in 2016, is Lecturer in Disciplines in the Music Department at Columbia University.

For many years, as the Associate Director of University Committee on Asia & the Middle East (UCAME) at Columbia, she worked closely with Wm. Theodore de Bary to develop and implement new Global Core courses that span East Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Western civilizations, most notably Nobility & Civility I and II, and Nature & Human Nature I and II. As Associate Director she was also instrumental in reaching out to the community of leading colleges and universities around the world to build international consensus and cooperation for global core curricula, including with Chinese Association for Liberal Education and its cohort of over 400 higher education institutions in China. As Lecturer with research interests in pedagogy of interculturation and Neo-Confucian cultural and intellectual history, she developed two new seminars, Friendship in Asian & Western Civilizations with Prof. Allan Silver, and Ritual & Music in East Asian Traditions, as well as taught Core courses in Music and EALAC Departments.

Dr. Chung received her B.M. and M.M. degrees from the Juilliard School in New York, and her M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia in 2002. Having published numerous articles, including the "Song of Ch'unhyang" for Wisdom in East Asian Classics, she is currently working on three books, The Pedagogy of Confucius; Interculturation: Rethinking the Future of Democracy with James Jinhong Kim; and Song Hyon's "Model for Study of Music": A Culminating Treatise of Neo-Confucian Political Philosophy. She has been on the Advisory Board of RCSS since 2014.