Assistant Professor of Government Grace Huang wants her students to find new viewpoints. “I like to challenge my students with the best works in comparative, East Asian and Chinese politics,” she explains. “These materials are often difficult for undergraduates to grasp. My most rewarding experiences are when students begin to connect with the materials, stimulating discussion in which everyone in the class comes away with a new viewpoint on an issue.”

Grace, who came to St. Lawrence in 2005, earned her graduate degrees at the University of Chicago, having earned her bachelor’s degree at Brown. She studies political leadership and its impact on politics, saying “My current work, which builds on my dissertation, investigates Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘politics of shame’ to confront domestic disunity in China and external threats from Japan during the 1920s and ’30s.” She is working on a book-length manuscript on this topic; it is under contract for publication by Cambria Press in 2009.

Aside from enjoying leading her students to find new points of view, Huang says attributes of her position at St. Lawrence are “a wonderful set of colleagues, a healthy and synergetic relationship between teaching and research, and a really beautiful office where I look forward to working every day.” She is conversant or proficient in the Mandarin, Taiwanese and Spanish languages.

Away from that office, Grace enjoys dancing Argentinean tango and “playing duets with my husband, he on the trumpet and I on the piano. I hope that our unborn baby is enjoying the music,” she adds, “but he seems to fall asleep every time we play.”