OUR HISTORY

Our history began in December 1949 with the establishment of the Shanghai Russian School affiliated to East China People’s Revolution University, as one of the earliest institutions where China’s higher education in foreign languages took shape. Its first president, Jiang Chunfang, is a renowned translator of Russian and publisher who pioneered the publication of The Encyclopedia of China.

Throughout its history, SISU has attracted and retained China's distinguished linguists, translators and philosophers with commitment to teaching and academic pursuits, including Professors Roland Fang Chong, Xu Zhongnian, Yan Disheng, Wang Dechun, Zhang Zhenbang, Li Guanyi, Yu Kuangfu and Xie Tianzhen, who have become part of the University’s increased wealth of intellectual resources.

LEADING ACADEMICS

A globalized and top-notch university in China, SISU has successfully developed a diverse and distinctive mix of disciplines crossing humanities, social sciences and natural sciences and in the fields of arts, education, economics, management, law and engineering with language and literature as its pillar.

Having established and maintained a high academic stature among universities of its kind, SISU has been funded to offer 29 national key degree programs, and 6 Shanghai leading disciplines, adding to our existing 3 national key disciplines and a national undergraduate education platform for European languages.

In recent years, SISU’s distinctive strength has been further enhanced with the number of language-related degree programs increasing and the number of doctoral and master’s degree programs significantly growing, resulting in a more balanced educational structure.

Currently, we offer courses in 54 languages, including 39 modern languages (English, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Turkish, Hindi, Hungarian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Polish, Czech, Urdu, Malay, Swahili, Javanese, Pashto, Tajik, Romanian, Belarusian, Sundanese, Cambodian, Bengali and Chinese). We also teach 15 classical and constructed languages, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Sanskrit, Syriac Aramaic, Pahlavi, Classical Nahuatl​, Yucatec Maya, Akkadian, Sumerian, Classical Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Gandhari, Esperanto and sign language.

The Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT) of SISU is awarded the highest ranking by AIIC, the International Association of Conference Interpreters, as the only Asian university among the top professional conference interpreting schools in the world and an active member of Conférence Internationale Permanente d'Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes (CIUTI).