During the epidemic, the teaching mode of the university shifted from offline to online. School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai Jiao Tong University innovated academic exchange forms, actively explored online teaching, and organized the first of academic navigation lectures for faculty and students. This series of lectures, with seven academic activities in plan, started from March 18 and will last for half a month, covering an in-depth exploration in the three directions of literature, linguistics and translation. On the evening of March 18th, the first lecture of the academic navigation series  named "What kind of literature research do we need today?" kicked off online. More than 300 teachers and students listened to it together. 

Chang Hui, dean of School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,  attended and delivered the opening speech. On behalf of SFL, Chang Hui expressed his concern for the students and told them to maintain physical and mental health and actively adjust their mentality. Chang expressed the hope that this event can turn into an opportunity to set up a platform to promote academic exchanges between teachers and students, who can navigate the academic sea together, enlightening their minds, fighting the epidemic academically and overcoming difficulties together. Chang Hui wished the first academic navigation series  a complete success.

This lecture invited Liu Jianjun, Distinguished Professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Shang Biwu, Tenured Professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, to have a dialogue on the topic of "What kind of literature research do we need today?" With humorous language and vivid and interesting examples,  Professor Liu Jianjun pointed out that literary researchers should have a strong sense of problems, pay attention to the particularity of problems in the specific context of The Times, and have certain predictive and forward-looking ability. As an illustration, he proposed new questions about such masterpieces as "On The Long War," "Hamlet" and "The Old Man and the Sea" based on contemporary context and specific current affairs. By conducting detailed textual analysis, he came to quite innovative conclusions, which impressed the audience a lot.
Professor Shang Biwu responded to Professor Liu Jianjun's speech from three perspectives: What kind of issues, positions and viewpoints, and perspectives and theory do we need for literary research. He believed that contemporary literature researchers should put forward research questions that respond to the reality of The Times, express personalized views and propositions, abandon theoretical worship, and internalize theory into thinking and methods of analyzing texts. In the end, Professor Shang Biwu proposed that an excellent literary researcher should take root in the text itself, upgrade his perception, comprehension and explanatory power, and cultivate himself deeply in a certain field, becoming a "hedgehog type" scholar rather than a "fox type" scholar.

Inspired by the two professors, SFL students raised questions actively in the Q-and-A session. The two teachers then gave insightful answers on how to view the commercialized popular literature and how to apply literary theory to texts, receiving high acclaim from the audience. The dialogue, which was dotted with copious quotes and references and thus drawing much inspiration, rendered the  lecture a great success. 
The first lecture of the first phase was hosted by Zhao Siqi, a doctoral student of 2018. As a student, she expressed her gratitude to SFL for setting up such a platform during the epidemic period for students to acquire knowledge, enrich themselves and improve their abilities. SFL’s master lectures enabled them to learn solid lessons and benefit a lot.
During the online teaching period, SFL faced the epidemic directly, innovated forms and diversified measures to meet the difficulties and challenges in this special period to support "online" teaching. Some solid actions were taken to further promote scientific research, liven up the academic atmosphere, improve education and teaching, help faculty’s scientific research, strengthen students’ innovation ability and enrich students' extracurricular life. The goal  of "When staying at home, teachers keep researching" and "When classes are suspended, students keep learning" was realized.