UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tina Chen, associate professor of English and Asian American studies and director of the Global Asias Initiative at Penn State, is the recipient of the 2024 Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award.
The Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award, established in 1994 by family, friends and colleagues of Rosemary Schraer, a former associate provost of Penn State, is presented each year to a University employee who exemplifies Schraer’s giving of herself as a mentor and who has voluntarily, over a period of time, helped others recognize and achieve their potential. Consideration is given to employees who have a record of outstanding mentoring service that goes beyond the requirements of their employment duties and responsibilities.
Nominators said Chen is well known for her dedication to mentoring. She’s the founder of the English department’s mentoring program and served as a longtime director. Chen created the mentoring program to reflect her belief that mentoring should occur at various levels and be multidirectional (as opposed to hierarchical). The program builds mentoring cohorts (mixed groups of grad students and faculty), hosts department-wide knowledge-sharing presentations, and supports early-career colleagues through manuscript mentoring workshops — all of which facilitate mutual learning at all levels, nominators said.
Chen also invests her own time heavily into mentoring, nominators said. Her advisees said she’s always giving feedback on their work, hosting writing workshops and reading groups, and even offering them opportunities to shadow her through independent studies. She has regularly taught English 501, a course designed to help incoming graduate students during the transition to graduate studies, and English 586, a course that introduces students to academic writing and publishing.
Her mentoring goes beyond her department, nominators said. She’s founding editor of the award-winning journal “Verge: Studies in Global Asias.” Chen made one of the journal’s core missions to help scholars — particularly emerging and early career scholars — advance. To further that, Chen encourages collaborations between senior and emerging scholars. This work most often happens through an opening section called "Convergence,” which features collaborative, nontraditional genres of academic writing.
Chen also creates mentoring opportunities as director of the Global Asias Institute, a multidisciplinary research center based at Penn State, where she designs collaborative programs and mentoring structures for scholars around the world. “Verge” and the GAI support two full-time graduate research assistants annually and those students receive robust mentorship in those positions, learning about academic publishing and contributing to the GAI’s various programs, which are both directed at a scholarly audience (i.e. conferences and summer institutes) and more public-facing, such as a Global Asias exhibition that opened in the Palmer Museum of Art in 2021 before touring nationally.
“Dr. Chen works with these graduate students as full colleagues, taking time to carefully train them for their jobs, but also meeting with them weekly to discuss their own publication plans, to workshop their writing, and to demystify various processes that go into the production of scholarly knowledge,” a nominator said.
In 2021, Chen earned the Excellence in Mentorship Award from the Association of Asian American Studies.
“Chen is an outstanding mentor because of both the care and attention that she puts into helping individual students achieve their potential and because of her ability to create lasting infrastructures for mentorship and mutual support,” a nominator said. “These benefit this generation of new scholars but will also undoubtedly help many more to come.”