The Carleton College Board of Trustees recently promoted two professors to endowed chair positions at the College, as announced by Dean of the College Elizabeth McKinsey. They are: Mariko Kaga, the Class of 1952 Professor of Asian Languages; and Qiguang Zhao, the Burton and Lily Levin Professor of Chinese.

Kaga earned a B.A. in English literature from Kobe Kaisei Women's College in Kobe, Japan in 1970. She taught English for several years at Nihon Business School in Osaka and Kobe Kaisei Women's College before coming to the United States in 1976 to study linguistics at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. After receiving an M.A. in 1978, she entered the doctoral program at Illinois, teaching Japanese language courses there and at the Middlebury College Japanese language summer school in addition to continuing her graduate studies. She was awarded a Ph.D. in second language acquisition and teacher's education in 1987, a year after joining the Carleton faculty. Kaga currently is a professor of Japanese.

The Class of 1952 Professorship of Asian Languages is made possible by a Challenge Grant of $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in December 2000, which has been matched almost entirely by a gift from Spencer and Barbara Gould, who graduated from Carleton in 1952 and 1957 respectively. The gift was in honor of Spencer Gould's 50th class reunion at Carleton. The endowment challenge grant provided for two positions in Asian languages and the trustees of the College named one of the positions for the Class of 1952.

Zhao received a B.A. in English from Tianjin Teachers College and an M.A. in English and American literature from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Bejing, China. In 1982, he came to the United States to continue his studies in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received a second master's degree and a Ph.D. He joined the Carleton faculty in 1987. He was promoted to the rank of professor in 2000 and has held the title of honorary professor and research fellow at Tianjin Institute of Foreign Languages since 1994. Zhao established Carleton's Chinese language program, which is part of the department of Asian languages and literature, consisting of three full-time faculty members in both Chinese and Japanese. The department plays an important role in the College's Asian studies program and the recently formed cross-cultural studies concentration. Zhao has taught elementary and intermediate level Chinese language, Chinese literature translation and comparative Chinese, and English short stories.

The Burton and Lily Levin Professorship of Chinese was established by Ambassador Burton Levin and his wife Lily. In 1985, they raised $250,000 from the Chinese business community in Hong Kong, where Ambassador Levin was U.S. Consul General. In 1987, Carleton Trustee Raphael Bernstein and his wife Jane Bernstein made a $350,000 challenge gift to Carleton to endow a second position for the teaching of Chinese language.