Stanley L. Mickel, Retired Professor of Languages and former Chair of the Department, specializes in Chinese language and literature.  In addition to languages courses, he teaches East Asian cultures and surveys of modern Chinese literature in translation.  In 1978 he was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to do research in Taiwan, The Republic of China.  His research and writing has resulted in more than 25 scholarly articles in such periodicals as Chinese Culture, Journal of Asian Studies, and the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. The scholarly papers he presented at professional meetings earlier in his career concerned decipherment of ancient Chinese oracle bone disaster graphs.  More recently, he has mainly written on questions of how to most effectively help students learn to read and speak Chinese.  His first book, Reading Chinese Newspapers: Tactics and Skills, published in 1992, is still widely used at colleges throughout the United States.  In 1999 he published Dictionary for Readers of Modern Chinese Prose.  This book is an innovative guide to the 250 grammatical markers most frequently used in modern Chinese writings.  Mickel earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. at the College of Chinese Culture in the Republic of China.  He was granted his Ph.D. by Indiana University.  He came to Wittenberg in 1971.