Thomas Moran
Dept Chair/John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese
- Office
- Voter Hall 105
- Tel
- (802) 443-5870
- moran@middlebury.edu
- Office Hours
- SPRING 2025: Tuesday and Wednesday, 3:45 to 5:15, and by appointment.
Professor of Chinese Thomas (Tom) Moran has a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature from Cornell University and has been at Middlebury since 1994. He teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century Chinese literature, film, and documentary film. Tom was the lead teacher in Beginning Chinese for many years and, more recently, performed the same role in Intermediate Chinese. He has taught First Year Seminars on the culture of mountains in the East and the West, the discourse of nature in Chinese civilization, and “Fate, Filial Piety and Passion in Chinese Civilization,” which he is offering in the fall 2024 semester.
In the 2024-2025 academic year, Tom is the Chair of the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese, his fifth term as Chair since 2001. Tom has also been Director of East Asian Studies (2009-2011), acting director of the Literature Program (2009-2010), and director of the C.V. Starr Middlebury School in China, Beijing (spring 2011). He has received grants from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Library of Taiwan, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program.
Tom is the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 (2007) and co-editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000 (2013). For these volumes Tom wrote the introductions and the essays on the writers Ding Ling, Zhang Tianyi, Gao Xingjian, and Liu Heng. In 2021, Tom and his co-editor published Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Poets Since 1949 in 2021, for which Tom co-wrote the introduction and wrote the essay on Taiwan poet Yu Guangzhong.
Tom has published book chapters and articles and translations of modern and contemporary Chinese plays, short stories, film scripts, and essays. His most recently published work includes his book chapter, “Resignation Open-Eyed: On the Chinese Novel Rickshaw Boy by Lao She,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature (John Wiley & Sons Ltd/Inc., 2020.
Tom’s translation of a 2010 novel by Beijing-based author Ning Ken will be published in late 2024 as Tibetan Sky by Sinoist Books. Tom is currently working on a translation of Ning Ken’s 2014 novel Three Trios.
Over the past twenty-five years, Tom has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to arrange for several Chinese artists to visit Middlebury to lecture, read their work and show their films, including novelist Ning Ken, nature writers Liu Kexiang and Zhang Dan, filmmakers Liu Jiayin, Zhang Mengqi and Wu Wenguang, and poets Aku Wuwu, Yu Jian, Xi Chuan and Bei Dao. At Tom’s invitation Taiwan poet and filmmaker Ye Mimi will come to Middlebury in October 2024 to read her work and do a session of her “Poetry Tarot” with Tom’s First Year Seminar students.
Tom has been affiliated with Middlebury’s program in environmental studies since 2004. His article “Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain” (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol 14, No 2, Fall 2002), a study of a novel by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, was one of the first works of ecocriticism about modern Chinese literature. He has published translations of selections from the late Chinese essayist and deep ecologist Wei An’s “Things on Earth,” which have appeared in “Mānoa,” “Cerise Press,” and the “New England Review.”
Before beginning graduate school at Cornell in 1984, Tom majored in Journalism, English, and Education at Syracuse University, worked as a carpenter’s assistant, and taught sixth grade at the International School of Beijing and eighth grade at Holy Redeemer School in Washington, D.C. Tom is married to the painter Rebecca Purdum (http://rebeccapurdumpaintings.com/), whose work is in the collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Since 1999 Tom and Rebecca have lived in Ripton, Vermont. They have volunteered as “citizen scientists” for the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas, Vermont Forest Bird Monitoring Program and, currently, Mountain Birdwatch.
Courses Taught
CHNS 0102
Continued Beginning Chinese
Course Description
Beginning Chinese
An intensive continuation of CHNS 0101, this course is required of those wishing to take CHNS 0103 in the spring. Students may anticipate learning a significant amount of new vocabulary, sentence patterns and idiomatic expressions. Skits, oral presentations, writing assignments, and cultural activities are also part of this course. (CHNS 0101)
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0201
Intermed Chinese
Course Description
Intermediate Chinese
This course is designed to enable the student to converse in everyday Chinese and to read simple texts in Chinese (both traditional and simplified characters). Discussion of assigned readings will be conducted primarily in Chinese. Familiarity with the vocabulary and grammar introduced in CHNS 0101, CHNS 0102, and CHNS 0103 is assumed. Grammatical explanations, written exercises, dictation quizzes, sentence patterns, oral drill, and online video and audio will accompany assignments. By the completion of CHNS 0202, which follows CHNS 0201 directly, students should be able to read and write approximately 1,200 characters. (CHNS 0103 or equivalent) 5 hrs. lect., 1 hr. drill
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0202
Intermediate Chinese II
Course Description
Intermediate Chinese
This course is a continuation of the first term's work, with the class conducted primarily in Chinese. (CHNS 0201 or equivalent) 5 hrs. lect., 1 hr. drill
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0220
Modern Chinese Literature
Course Description
Modern China through Literature (in translation)
This course, taught in English, is a discussion-based seminar on some of the most significant works of short fiction, novellas, and novels that tell the story of China and the Chinese from the end of the Qing dynasty to the present. Students will gain a better understanding of the history of modern China by studying the works of literature that inspired readers and provoked debate during one hundred years of social reform, revolution, war, civil war, reconstruction, cultural revolution, cultural revival, and economic growth. Our reading will include work by authors such as Lu Xun (Diary of a Madman, 1918), Zhang Ailing (Love in a Fallen City, 1944), Ah Cheng (The Chess King, 1984), Yu Hua (To Live, 1993), and, from Taiwan, Zhu Tianwen (Notes of a Desolate Man, 1999). We will consider the mainstream (socially engaged realism), the avant-garde (varieties of modernism), and popular genres (romance and martial arts), and we will look for answers to the following questions: what has been the place of fiction in China in the modern era and what vision of modern China do we find in its fiction? (No prerequisites) 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0240
Current
The Literature of the PRC
Course Description
The Literature of the People's Republic of China (in English)
In this course we will read a selection of significant short stories, novels, and plays published in the People’s Republic of China from its founding in 1949 to the present. We will begin with a look at the Maoist period and then study fiction and nonfiction that reflects on the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), experimental fiction, literary responses to the events of June 4, 1989, popular literature, environmental literature, women’s writing, stories from or about Tibet and Xinjiang, and science fiction. This is a College Writing course, and each student will write a draft and final version of a research paper, an analytical essay, and a creative work or translation. 3 hrs. lect. (This course will be taught in English)
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0250
Chinese-language Cinema
Course Description
Chinese-language Cinema
This course, taught in English, surveys the history of movies in China since the 1930s and also offers an in-depth look at the work of: China's fifth-generation directors of the 1980s and their successors up to the present; Taiwan's new wave; and Hong Kong popular cinema, including martial arts film. Our focus is the screening and discussion of films such as The Goddess (a 1934 silent classic), Stage Sisters (1965; directed by the influential Xie Jin), the controversial Yellow Earth (1984), In the Heat of the Sun (a 1994 break with the conventional representation of the Cultural Revolution), Yang Dechang's masterpiece A One and a Two (2000), and Still Life (Jia Zhangke's 2006 meditation on displacement near the Three Gorges Dam). The course is designed to help students understand the place of cinema in Chinese culture and develop the analytical tools necessary for the informed viewing and study of Chinese film. We will look at everything from art film, to underground film, to recent box office hits. (No prerequisites) One evening film screening per week. 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0340
Cont Chns & Sinophone Lit/Cult
Course Description
Literature and Culture in Contemporary China and the Sinophone World (in English translation)
In this course we will study select works of acclaimed, popular, and/or controversial short fiction, spoken drama, and poetry from the People’s Republic of China and the post-1949 Sinophone world, primarily Taiwan. We will devote some attention to other forms of cultural production, including film and visual art. We will place a particular emphasis on the study of work by Chinese and Sinophone writers and artists who belong to non-Han ethnic minority groups (e.g., Tibetan, Yi, and Atayal), and we will explore possible answers to the question, “How is Chinese national and cultural identity created and contested in literature?” 3 hrs. lect./disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0350
Current
Documentary Film in Cont China
Course Description
Documentary Film in Contemporary China (taught in English)
In China since the 1980s, new political and socio-economic realities, along with new technologies, created conditions for the emergence of the New Documentary Movement, the collective achievement of a group of artists with new ideas about what the form and function of nonfiction film should be. We will screen and discuss select contemporary Chinese documentary films, all with English subtitles, place these films in the context of global documentary film history, and learn methods for the analysis of nonfiction film. We will “read” each film closely, and also study secondary sources to learn about the Chinese realities that each film documents. Taught in English. 3 hrs. lect./screening
Terms Taught
Requirements
CHNS 0500
Current
Upcoming
Independent Project
Course Description
Senior Essay
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
CHNS 0700
Current
Upcoming
Senior Essay
Course Description
Senior Thesis
(Approval required)
Terms Taught
CHNS 0701
Senior Thesis Research
Course Description
Senior Thesis Proposal
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
CHNS 0702
Current
Upcoming
Senior Thesis
Course Description
Senior Thesis
(Approval required).
Terms Taught
Requirements
FYSE 1472
Fate, Filial Piety, & Passion
Course Description
Fate, Filial Piety, and Passion in Chinese Civilization
In this course, for which no prior study of China is needed, we will look at the place of the ideas of “ming” (fate), “xiao” (filial piety) and “qing”(passion) in Chinese culture as they are expressed in literature and film. We will study fortune telling, including divination using the 1000 BCE “Book of Changes,” read traditional and modern versions of the story of the filial woman warrior Mulan, and discuss the grand, death-defying passion in the Ming dynasty opera “The Peony Pavilion.” Our contemporary texts will include the film “Farewell My Concubine,” the novel “To Live,” and the documentary film “Our Time Machine,” about a son’s love for his aging father. Written work will be both critical and creative. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
IGST 0704
Upcoming
EAS Senior Thesis
Course Description
East Asian Studies Senior Thesis
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
LITS 0710
Senior Honors Essay
Course Description
Senior Honors Essay
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
Areas of Interest
Modern Chinese fiction
Chinese nature and landscape literature
Chinese cinema