Emma Teng, associate professor of foreign languages and literature and Class of '56 Career Development Chair, has been awarded the 2005 Levitan Prize in the Humanities, announced Philip Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
Professor Teng received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1997, and joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section in 1998.
The $25,000 prize was established through a gift from James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry, an emeritus member of the MIT Corporation and of-counsel at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom of New York City. The prize, first awarded in 1990, supports innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities by faculty members in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
Professor Teng will research her book, "The Chinese Eurasian: East-West Interracialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," which she describes as "a comparative study of Chinese and Chinese American representations of Chinese-Western interracialism."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 9, 2005 (download PDF).