Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) was founded in 1949, originally known as Shanghai College of Russian. In 1963, SISU became a national key institution of higher learning upon approval by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. In 1994, approved by the State Education Commission (SEC), the University adopted its present name and was selected as one of the first universities in Shanghai to be jointly funded and administered by SEC and Shanghai Municipal Government. In 1996, SISU was granted to be a “Project 211” university by SEC, which, as a national educational priority for the 21st century, was the State’s endeavor to help China’s top 100 institutions of higher learning and key disciplines to excel. The mission of SISU is to cultivate high-level foreign language professionals with multi-disciplinary knowledge and international expertise.
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Currently, SISU has an enrollment of 6,557 undergraduate students and 3-year associate degree students, 1,400 postgraduate students, and over 1,000 international students. Part-time students registered with SISU total 25,000. The University has a full-time faculty of more than 500.
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SISU comprises 20 academic colleges, schools and departments. They are: Colleges of English, Japanese Culture & Economy, and Oriental Languages, Departments of Russian, French, German, and Western Languages, Colleges of International Finance & Trade, International Business Administration, Journalism and Communication, International Education, International Cultural Exchange, School of Law, Advanced School of Translation, Graduate School, Colleges of Online Education, Vocational Education, Continuing Education, Xin Zhong College and Xian Da College of Economics and Liberal Arts. In addition, the University has four service departments, namely: Department of Physical Education, Department of Social Sciences, Preparatory School for Personnel Going Abroad and Department of Intensive Training for Personnel Going Abroad.
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SISU’s English and Russian Languages & Literatures are key disciplines at the state level, and English, Russian and Arabic Languages & Literatures are key ones at Shanghai municipal level. SISU also houses one state-level key research base for liberal arts & social sciences: the Middle Eastern Studies, and one undergraduate education base in Western European Languages & Cultures. SISU chairs the National Guiding Committee for Teaching Foreign Languages in Institutions of Higher Learning under the Ministry of Education.
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SISU has over ten research institutions. They include School for International Relations & Diplomacy, Institute of Middle Eastern Culture, Institute of Language & Literature, Centers for American, Canadian, German-speaking Region and New Zealand Studies, and Center for Intercultural Communications. The areas of research entail foreign languages and literatures, international politics, economy, comparative cultures and cross-cultural communications. The University edits and publishes over ten scholarly journals, including Foreign Languages, Foreign Language World, International Observation, Comparative Literature in China and Arabic World.
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SISU maintains close academic and exchange relations with universities overseas. So far, it has established collaborative relationships with more than 100 universities in over 30 countries and regions.
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The two University Libraries maintain a collection of 900,000 volumes and nearly 2,000 newspapers and magazines in Chinese and foreign languages. It also manages the information center of the Ministry of Education for liberal arts and humanities, the Oxford English Teaching Materials Center and the Distribution and Transfer Center of Books Donated by the US Asian Foundation.
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SISU has now two campuses, one in Hongkou District and the other in Songjiang New District. The Hongkou Campus, covering an area of 200 mu, is located to the north of the Luxun Park and runs programs primarily for graduate, international and part-time students. The Songjiang Campus, a newly-built facility located in the east of the Songjiang University Park, is currently for undergraduate programs. It occupies an area of 867 mu, with a total floor space of 150,000 square meters. The library and information center standing at the center of the campus is a landmark structure of the University, surrounded by nine classroom buildings of distinctive architectural style of different countries.
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