Shigeru Miyagawa
Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture; professor, Foreign Languages and Literatures Section/Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Shigeru Miyagawa is professor of linguistics and holds the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture.
His linguistics publications in syntax, argument structure, and Japanese linguistics include several books/monographs and nearly 50 articles. He was an associate editor of Language, 2000–2003.
Along with linguistics, he runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in multilingual, multicultural societies, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition, Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandprix 2000, and the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. JP NET (http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/JPNet.shtml), which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the Web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993–1994). Visualizing Cultures (visualizingcultures.mit.edu), in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational Web site. It won the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award.
For his work in interactive media, the educational technology magazine Converge chose him as one of 20 national "Shapers of the Future." He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu