PhD Student Profiles
David Atherton Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
David is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature. He studied Chinese literature for his B.A. at Harvard University (2000) and completed an M.A. in classical Thai literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006). In between, he studied in Beijing, taught English in rural Japan, and attended Chiang Mai University. His dissertation (tentatively titled "Performance and Identity in the Writing, Life, and Legacy of Ihara Saikaku") examines the 17th century poet/playwright/author Saikaku as a figure whose work and life were both intimately bound up with performance, theatricality, and the embodiment of constantly shifting identities--so much so that Saikaku himself was transformed into a contested fictional character immediately after his death. In the dissertation, David hopes to examine the roles of authorship, popular genres, and celebrity as they interact with broader discourses of identity formation and representation in late 17th century Japan. David finds the topic of "performed identity" particularly relevant to this profile, in which he is writing about himself in the third person.
Joshua Batts Japanese History
Advisor: Gregory Pflugfelder
Joshua Batts received his B.A. from Whittier College (2006) with an emphasis on Japanese history. He began work on a Ph.D. in Japanese history at Columbia in the fall of 2009, teaching English in Japan on the outskirts of Tokyo in the interim. Joshua's current research interests include the spread of firearms and other introduced commodities throughout Japan in the 16th and 17th century and the broader networks guiding these exchanges. He is also interesting in the "mapping" of Japan, and its representation on and through different media in the early modern period.
Allison Bernard Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Before joining Columbia's PhD program in the fall of 2012, Allison received her BA from Middlebury College (2010) and an MA from Columbia's East Asian Languages and Cultures department (2012). Her MA thesis examined the late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei cihua through the lens of its circulating information, considering how spoken transmissions, mainly in the form of gossip, function as both a narrative mechanism and exchangeable 'commodity' within the novel's domestic information economy. Her current research interests span broadly across the terrain of Ming/Qing (and some Yuan) vernacular fiction and drama, but she intends to locate her doctoral work within a research matrix that combines perspectives from critical theory, book history, and print culture to situate literary texts in their paradigms of cultural production and reception.
Stephen Boyanton Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Stephen Boyanton received his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Florida (1995). After receiving his B.A. he spent five years living and traveling in China before returning the U.S. to pursue his M.A. in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2004) and his M.S. in the clinical practice of Chinese medicine from Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, San Diego (2008). He is now working on his PhD in Chinese History focusing on Chinese medical history. In particular, he is researching the renaissance of the Han dynasty medical text, the Discourse on Cold Damage, which occurred during the Song Dynasty.
Kevin Buckelew Chinese Religion
Advisor:
Kevin is a Ph.D. student in Chinese religion. He is interested in reexamining Tang and Song Chinese Buddhism through the mirror of contemporary Daoist thought and practice, especially with regard to discourses on the body. His investigation is presently focused on Buddhist uses of apparently Daoist terms and frameworks like "nourishing the fetus of the sage." Other research interests include the looming threat of demonic attack in "elite" discourses on Chan practice; the mapping of bodhisattva path literature onto the physical Chinese landscape; and the mechanics of Buddhist literary genres. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007, and subsequently earned two M.A. degrees at Columbia: in the department of Religion (2009) and in East Asian Languages and Cultures (2011).
JM Chris Chang Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
JM Chris Chang is a first-year doctoral student working on the tension between social trauma and authorized history in post-Cultural Revolution China. He received his BA from Amherst College (2007) and a dual-MA from Columbia and the London School of Economics (2010). Prior to returning to Columbia for the PhD track, he spent a year as a visiting researcher at Beijing University with the support of a Chinese government scholarship. While generally to be found reading in cafes, Chris is also an overeager rock climber and Frisbee player.
Chang Ti-Kai Chinese Literature
Advisor: Weihong Bao
Ti-Kai Chang received her B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University (2006) and an M.A. in Film Studies at Columbia University (2009). Her research focuses on Chinese cinema, drama and visual cultures, with extensive interests in world cinema, film theory and film history. Her M.A. thesis examined the roles of Ang Lee and Eileen Chang as trans-cultural double agents through the close reading of Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007). Currently she is conducting research on Taiwanese documentary and East Asian film culture during colonial period.
Glenda Chao Chinese History
Advisor: Li Feng
Glenda is a PhD student focusing on the archaeology of the Bronze Age in south China. Her research interests include how archaeological, historical and paleographical sources can be used in conjunction with one another to study the origins of regional bronze culture styles during the late Western Zhou and early Spring and Autumn periods in China, as well as how the archaeological record reflects the political, social, and economic relationships between different regions of China during the Eastern Zhou period. She also has a budding interest in archaeological theory and its relationship to the development of the archaeology of China as a discipline. She received her B.A. in archaeology from Boston University in 2007 and her M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia in 2009.
Bu Yun Chen Chinese History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko
Buyun is currently completing her dissertation research in Beijing, China. Her dissertation investigates the emergence of fashion in the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907) through an integrated approach of history and material culture studies. Specifically, her dissertation aims to clarify fashion's relationship to the market, female labor, and the formation of a new self during this critical period of Chinese history. She received her B.A. from Barnard College (2005) in History before crossing the street to become a doctoral candidate in the History-East Asia program.
Chen Kaijun Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Chen Kaijun is a PhD student in early modern Chinese literature (from Song dynasty to Qing dynasty). He also affiliates to the Institute of Comparative Literature and society. He received his B.A (2005) in Chinese literature from Fudan University, Shanghai and his Maitrise in Philosophy from Sorbonne-Paris I in 2007. His research concerns the cultural history of craftsmanship and the transmission of crafting knowledge. More specifically, he studies how the 'literati' of the local society involved in the world-wide production and circulation of artifacts and related knowledge.
Chi Li Chinese Literature
Advisor: Weihong Bao
Chi Li received her B.A. in Film Studies from Peking University (2006) and M.A. in Film Studies from The University of Warwick (2008). She just completed her second M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia and is now a first year Ph.D. student in EALAC as well a fellow in the Institute of Comparative Literature and society. She is currently interested in Chinese film culture during the mid twentieth century.
Ksenia Chizhova Korean History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko
Ksenia is a PhD student of Premodern Korean literature - interested in the 18th century women's writing. Before Columbia, she studied English and Slavic Linguistics.
Kumhee Cho Korean History
Advisor: Charles Armstrong
KumHee Cho is a Korean but grew up in Japan. She got her BA at University of Wisconsin-Superior with East Asian Studies. After graduation, she taught Japanese at a high school in Madison WI for a year. She is fluent in Japanese and Korean. KumHee focuses on Korean diasporas, especially the North Korean community in Japan where she grew up. She is interested in exploring how the identities of these Koreans, excluded from the Japanese mainstream, have evolved in response to changing political and social factors. She also hopes to incorporate a comparative approach, examining North Koreans in Japan as part of the broader category of Korean or even Asian diaspora communities worldwide.
Jae Won Chung Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Jae Won is interested in articulations of resistance in Korean colonial-period literature. He is also interested in the relatively recent phenomenon of translation and transplantation of contemporary Korean literature outside of ROK, via state-sponsored institutions. During his time at Columbia, he plans to expand his areas of specialty to visual culture and Asian-American literature. Prior to starting his PhD, he received his MFA in fiction writing from Columbia and taught literary translation in Seoul.
Chung Dajeong Korean History
Advisor: Charles Armstrong
Dajeong is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Korean history. She studied history at Williams College (2005) and received an M.A. from Columbia University (2008). Her dissertation examines the ways in which the spread of U.S. foodstuffs in postwar South Korea revealed the nature and meanings of American influence in East Asia. How was it possible that unfamiliar foodstuffs from the U.S. become part of Korean diet in such a short time? What does the appropriation of food industry by the locals in later decades say about the relationship between industrialization of South Korea and the U.S. influence? Her story of foreign foodstuffs takes us back to 1945 and re-evaluates the roles played by the United States and by economic initiatives of the unlikely individuals such as the American G.I.s, sex workers and black market profiteers. It is an untold story not only of South Korea but of globalization, intersecting the local with the U.S. foreign policy.
Andre Deckrow Japanese History
Advisor: Carol Gluck
Andre Deckrow is a doctoral student in modern Japanese history. His research focuses on twentieth century Japanese migration to Latin America, specifically Brazil. He received his B.A. in History and Asian Languages and Cultures from Amherst College in 2006. Andre spent the 2007-2008 academic year traveling around the Pacific Rim researching Japanese gardens as symbols of historical memory as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. For the 2010-2011 academic year, Andre serves as a Co-President of the Graduate History Association, the organization that represents all history graduate students at Columbia.
Anatoly Detwyler Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Before coming to Columbia to pursue a PhD in Chinese and comparative literature, I studied Chinese at the University of Minnesota (BA, 2006) and at ICLP in Taiwan (2006-7). My dissertation, tentatively titled "The Arc and the Net: 'Information' and Communication in Modern Chinese Literature, 1897-1945," retraces the ways by which communication became a key discipline and discourse in China between 1897-1945. Because the issue of communication was closely bound up with the program of cultural change, it was thoroughly explored through literary writing and criticism: modern Chinese literature not only reflected the communications turn, it also reflected upon it, asking questions about communication's mediacy and immediacy that remain relevant today.
Nina Duthie Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei and Robert Hymes
Nina Duthie is a doctoral student in premodern Chinese literature, with a focus on historical texts and cultural history of the Han through Tang dynasties. She is currently engaged in researching and writing her dissertation, which will examine the representation of barbarians and wildernesses in Northern and Southern dynasties historiography. For the 2010-2011 academic year, she completed coursework and conducted research at National Taiwan University with the support of a Fulbright grant. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program in 2007, she received an M.A. in modern Chinese literature from Columbia University (2002), then worked in academic publishing for a time. Originally from Rhode Island, she has also lived in Xi'an, Taipei, and Tokyo.
Clay Eaton Japanese History
Advisor: Carol Gluck
Clay Eaton is a doctoral student in modern Japanese history. He received is B.A. (2007) from Lewis & Clark College, where he studied International Affairs, History, and Japanese. Before starting his graduate studies, Clay spent two years teaching English in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. His primary interest is in state-endorsed and communal memories of World War II in Southeast Asia, particularly in Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore. He is more generally interested in group identity formation and modern nationalism.
Matthieu Felt Japanese Literature
Advisor: David Lurie
Matthieu Felt began working on premodern Japanese literature at Columbia in 2010. After finishing his undergraduate program at the University of Chicago, he taught junior high school English for four years on the island of Tanegashima, Kagoshima prefecture. He also worked for several years in IT at the University of Chicago. He is primarily interested in the Nihon Shoki and other imperial histories.
Thomas Gaubatz Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki
Tom entered the PhD program in Japanese Literature at Columbia in 2009. He is interested broadly in the intersection between linguistic form and literary style, including topics ranging from narratology and poetics to natural language change and cognitive theories of literature. He hopes to use these perspectives to study the literary transformations that took place between the Edo and Meiji periods. After receiving his BS in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2006, Tom spent the interim working in San Francisco's video game industry, and he maintains a furtive interest in the incipient field of game design theory and criticism.
Noga Ganany Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Noga received her BA and MA from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and in between studied Chinese for one year at Xiamen University. Her Master's thesis explored the literary tradition and religious worship of judge Bao-gong in late imperial and modern China and Taiwan. She is interested in the dynamics between literature and religion in late imperial China, as well as the evolution of recurring themes in Chinese literature and popular culture.
Jennifer Guest Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane and David Lurie
Jennifer is a Ph.D. candidate in premodern Japanese literature, with interests centered chronologically on the Heian period and including kanbun literature, the reception of Chinese texts and systems of knowledge, and the creative or playful literary juxtaposition of wabun and kanbun styles. She is also interested (even) more broadly in premodern literacies and models for literary education, and in the comparative history of linguistic thought and scholarship. Her dissertation project examines the texts and practices of literary education in premodern Japan and what they reveal about the relationship between kanbun and wabun styles; by reconstructing how literati learned to create and appreciate literature, it will explore the diversity of premodern Japanese literary culture and the role of kanbun as a literary language with both translocal and local, culturally-embedded aspects.
Gal Gvili Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Gal is a modern Chinese literature student in EALAC as well a fellow in the Institute of Comparative Literature and society. She received her B.A and M.A from Hebrew University, Jerusalem before beginning her PhD at Columbia in 2008. She is mainly interested in cross-cultural journeys of literary genres, particularly in the rise of realism in modern China in its relation to biblical religions and to the notion of world literature.
Nan Ma Hartmann Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Nan has lived in Beijing, Tokyo, California before coming to New York City for graduate school. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University and M.S. in Economics and Finance from Columbia Business School. Her dissertation project focuses on Japanese adaptations of Chinese prose narratives, from late medieval to early modern period, particularly adaptations of Ming supernatural tales. This thesis explores issues related to vernacularization movement, cultural transformation and worldviews reflected in genre and linguistic development in Japan and China.
Ho Han-Peng Chinese History
Advisor: Feng Li
Han-Peng is currently writing his dissertation on early China, focusing on the conceptualization, use and development of land, and its social, economic and administrative implications in the Zhou period. Other interests include visual and material culture, cultural heritage resource management, and museum education. He holds B.A. (History, Sociology), M.A. (History, Art & Archaeology), and M.Phil. (Archaeology) degrees from the universities of Singapore, London, and Cambridge, respectively.
Jonathan Kief Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Jon Kief is a doctoral student in modern Korean literature and comparative intellectual history. His research focuses on 1920s-1950s Korean debates over the proper form and function of "humanist" thought, and he hopes to use these debates' successive iterations to trace the shifting intellectual currents moving between Korea, Japan, the US, and Europe. Ultimately, his goal is to show how an historical consideration of changing constitutions of "humanity" in Korean discursive practice can help re-embed these contentious decades -- often framed in terms of the colonial/postcolonial rupture, the dual Pacific and Korean War divides, and the birth of a new Cold War order -- in a more complex narrative linking Korean and transnational intellectual history.
Sujung Kim Japanese and Korean Religion
Advisor: Bernard Faure
Sujung Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Buddhist Studies program at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in History from Sogang University and a Masters degree in Buddhist Philosophy from Korea University in Korea before beginning her Ph.D. program at Columbia University in 2007. Her dissertation project focuses on a Buddhist deity called Shinra Myojin, whose name alludes to its possible connection wtih Korea-worshipped on Mt. Hiei in medieval Japan. In her dissertation she hopes to contextualize the cult of Shinra Myojin by examining various historical records, temple chronicles, ritual texts, and the iconography of the deity. Sujung is broadly interested in East Asian Buddhism with a special focus on Korean Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism in the medieval period. Her research interests also include Esoteric Buddhist rituals, Daoist influences on Buddhism, and Buddhist folklore.
Nicole Kwoh Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Nicole Kwoh is a doctoral student in History studying the political and cultural history of modern China. She received her BA from Wellesley College with a dual degree in Political Sciences and Art History. She cultivated her interested in political history, modern law and material culture as a research fellow at the National Palce Museum in Taipei. She worked as a Technical Writer; assisting scholars to publish and teaching undergraduate and graduate Technical Communications. She is currently completing coursework.
Brian Lander Chinese History
Advisor: Feng Li
Brian Lander is a doctoral student in early Chinese history under the guidance of Li Feng. Brian studies the environmental transformations involved in the development of centralized bureaucratic states during the Zhou and Qin periods (1045-206 B.C.) in north China. He combines textual, archaeological and palaeoecological data to explore both the wild flora and fauna of the region and the ecology of human subsistence. Brian received a B.A. from the University of Victoria and an M.A. from McGill University, and has also studied at the universities of Hong Kong, Nijmegen (NL), Lanzhou and at East China Normal University.
Elizabeth Lawrence Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Liza is a PhD student in modern Chinese history. Her research interests include material culture, the history of printing and the book, techniques of authentication, and changing attitudes toward copies and concepts of authenticity in the early twentieth century. Her dissertation project brings these interests together by exploring the cultural history of the seal, or chop, in modern China. Liza received a B.A. in History/English from Grinnell College (2003) and an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (2008).
Lei Lei Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Lei Lei started her PhD at Columbia in 2012 after finishing her MA here. She is also a fellow in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Her research deals with a broad range of subjects including modern Chinese literature, history of biological science and critical theory.
Lin Hsin-Yi Chinese History
Advisor: Chun-fang Yu
I received my BA (2003) and MA (2007) in History from National Taiwan University, and came to Columbia University at 2009. My general research interest is Chinese religion history, including the interaction between Buddhism, Daoism and popular religion, how gender works and women's beliefs in them. I have explored the idea of dharma's decline in the medieval China, and how rulers, sangha, and women believers were influenced by and responded to this Buddhist eschatological crisis in my MA thesis. (The Decline of Dharma and Women's Beliefs in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, Taipei: Dao Shiang Press, 2008). In the future, I plan to deal with women's belief world from the perspectives of Buddhism-Daoism intercommunication in the medieval China.
Shing-Ting Lin Chinese History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko & Eugenia Lean
Shing-Ting Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in modern Chinese history. Before joining Columbia, she received her B.A. in History with a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from National Taiwan University (2006). Her research interests include the history of gender and women, body history, and history of science and medicine. She is currently conducting her dissertation research on the professionalization of medicine for women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. This project also explores the changing understandings of female bodies in a cross-cultural context during the late Qing and Republican periods (1860s-1940s).
Peng Liu Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Peng is a doctoral student in premodern Chinese literature. He studied classical Chinese literature at Soochow University, Fudan University, and UCSB before coming to Columbia. His research interests include Ming-Qing literature and Chinese Buddhist hagiography of the medieval period.
Ryan Martin Chinese History
On leave
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Ryan Martin is a PhD. candidate in Chinese history interested in how vernacular architecture reflects a local response to broad social changes. Before coming to Columbia he received his BA from Brown (2000) and completed an MA in Regional Studies at Harvard (2006). In between, he spent time living in Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai. After finishing coursework, he plans to spend the 2010-2011 academic year in doing research in the region overlapping the borders of Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong, research that will involve a lot bike riding through a lot of small towns.
Michael McCarty Japanese History
Advisor: David Lurie
Michael McCarty received his B.A. from Baylor University before coming to Columbia in 2006. He is currently ABD studying at the Inter-University Center in Yokohama before beginning dissertation research at Tokyo University. Michael's research interests are in pre-modern Japanese history, particularly the Heian-Kamakura transition and courtier-warrior interaction. He is also interested in using narrative sources to examine the process of rationalizing defeat, and his dissertation will center on the JÅkyÅ« Disturbance of 1221 as a juncture of both of these interests.
Neil McGee Chinese Religion
Advisor: Chun-fang Yu
Neil McGee is a Ph.D. candidate in pre-modern Chinese history at Columbia University. He completed a B.A. (1994) and an M.A. (2005) in Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His main area of study is the history of Chinese religions in the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, with a focus on Mongol patronage of Daoism during the late Yuan. Neil's proposed dissertation title is Mysterious Teachings: Mongol patronage and state-sponsored Daoism in middle-period China, 1276-1500.
Gabriel McNeill Japanese Literature
Advisor: David Lurie
Gabriel entered the PhD in Japanese Literature in 2010 with the intention of studying the literature of the Nara period in general, and the Kojiki in particular. His research interests range from the representation of kingship, notions of legitimacy, and the rhetoric of rulership in early literature, to the reception and appropriation of early texts as occurred in later periods, didactic tales (setsuwa), myth (shinwa), and the influence of Chinese literature and language on native prose writing (wabun and wakan-konkobun). He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and an MA in Biostatistics from UC Berkeley, as well as an MA in East Asian Studies from UCLA. While at UCLA he wrote MA papers on the representation of Susanoo in the Kojiki, on selected linguistic aspects (the translation of names, and censorship through partial translation into Latin) of the two main English translations of the Kojiki, and on a Song Dynasty travel account written by Shuqin Su in which he describes his journey to and stay at a Chan Buddhist monastery at Dongting Mountain in Suzhou.
Jennifer Wang Medina Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Jenny Wang Medina is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Korean Literature and Culture. She received a B.A. in English literature from UC Berkeley, and a Master's degree from Columbia (separately). She is currently in Seoul as a Fulbright fellow conducting research for her dissertation, which deals with Korean literature and popular media in the late 20th century. She is specifically interested in the transformation of Korean culture through the period of democratization the late 1980s to a post-industrial consumer society. She also translates Korean literature, and through this, has become interested in how institutionalization may have changed the character of Korean literary production. Her publications include translations of Oh Jung-hee's The Bird, and several other short stories by contemporary Korean authors.
Carolyn Pang Japanese Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Carolyn Pang is a Ph.D. student of pre-modern Japanese literature. Carol received her B.A. (2005) and M.A. (2010) in Japanese Studies from the National University of Singapore. During this period, she participated in research programs at Waseda University and Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Focusing on the study of Onmyôdô (Japanese Yin Yang Theory), Carols research investigates the cultural and literary encounters between Japan and China by highlighting the transnational nature of religions in Japan during the Heian and medieval period. Her research interests extend to the visual arts of Japan and China, particularly emaki (Japanese scroll paintings), as well as pre-modern East Asian history and East Asian religious practices and folk beliefs.
Gregory Patterson Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Greg is a Ph.D. candidate in pre-modern Chinese literature, studying Six Dynasties and Tang poetry with Professor Wendy Swartz. He received a B.A. in comparative literature from Columbia (2006). Currently, Greg is in Taipei on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, taking classes at National Taiwan University and conducting research for a dissertation on the representation of memory in the late poetry of Du Fu (712-770). His project will explore the rhetoric used in the construction of these influential evocations of a lost golden age, as well as their intersections with medieval discourses of geography, art, and history. Greg is broadly interested in issues of literary theory and aesthetics. He is also a practicing jazz guitarist and an avid music lover.
Chris Peacock Chinese Literature
Advisors: Lydia Liu
Chris received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from The School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) in Chinese History and in Chinese Literature. His research interests include modern literature by and about minority nationalities in the People's Republic of China, particularly literature about Tibet by Han authors.
Pau Pitarch Fernandez Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Pau Pitarch received a BA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) and an MA in Language and Information Sciences from the University of Tokyo (Japan). His MA thesis dealt with the Taisho era writings of Sato Haruo and their development of European Aestheticism. Pau joined the Japanese Literature PhD program at Columbia University in 2009, to work on early 20th C narrative and criticism. He is interested in the connections between aesthetics and scientific discourse and the uses of "illness" as a literary and ideological trope.
Daniel Poch Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki
A native from Berlin, Daniel received his M.A. in Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies and German Literature from the University of Heidelberg (2006). His dissertation project with the tentative title "Entangled Literacies: Dynamics of Sino-Japanese Intertextuality and Cultural Translation from the 10th to the Late 19th Century" examines and compares textual "sites" -- literary anthologies from the Heian, Edo and Meiji periods -- in which Chinese (kan) and Japanese (wa) styles, genres and poetic discourses intersect and/or merge. His broader interests also include Western (esp. German and French) literature as well as literary/aesthetic theory and philosophy.
Helen Qiu Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Having earned her MA degree from EALAC at Columbia in 2010, Helen Qiu is currently pursuing her PhD by studying Chinese religion with a particular focus on religious epistemology. Her goal is to discover the nature of the questions people ask themselves and how they go about the process of finding the answers when faced with supernatural encounters or wishes. She will primarily use history and literature from the pre-modern period as tools of her study. Prior to coming to Columbia, Helen had a BS degree from Zhongshan University and an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, followed by several years of career in engineering and project management. However, after she encountered Christianity, her interest in engineering and business was profoundly overtaken by religious topics, which prompted her career change. She resigned from her job at Sun Microsystems and began studies for an advanced Master's degree in Theology, specializing in Reformation history and theology. Her training helped her to realize that current Christian theology, after nearly two millennium of academic history, had yet to engage with Chinese religious thoughts and practices. She then reckoned that the most immediate and imperative step towards filling this gap was to fully master the patterns of development of Chinese religion itself.
Chelsea Schieder Japanese History
Advisor: Gregory M. Pflugfelder
Chelsea Szendi Schieder is a Ph.D. student in modern Japanese history, specializing in postwar film, political thought, social movements and the happy junctures at which these three intersect. Originally interested in European history east of Vienna, after time lived in Hungary she moved--both literally and figuratively--further East, although she harbors hope that her work retains a global perspective. She is currently working on her dissertation project on gender and community in the radical student Left in Japan.
Joshua Schlachet Japanese History
Advisor: Carol Gluck
Joshua Evan Schlachet is a first-year doctoral student in 19th-century Japanese cultural history with an emphasis on Japan’s international relationships during the Tokugawa period. His research interests focus on the impacts of emerging food exchange networks on the cultural, economic & intellectual transformations of the early-19th century as well as the tensions between emerging popular restaurant culture and the crises of famine and social upheaval along Japan’s rural margins. Joshua earned his B.A. in History and Asian Studies from Cornell University in 2008 and his M.A. in Japanese Studies from the University of Michigan in 2011. He conducted Fulbright research on the socio-political significance of the sugar trade in southern Japan in 2009 and more recently explored questions of Japanese ethnographic representation in Leiden, The Netherlands.
Shim Mi-Ryong Modern Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes & Tomi Suzuki
Mi-Ryong Shim is a PhD student of modern Korean and East Asian literatures. She is currently writing her dissertation on imperialization of the colonized population during the Asia-Pacific War, with particular interest in how Korean intellectuals sought to “domesticate” the regionalist discourse produced and circulating from the imperial metropole. Mi-Ryong has conducted research in Seoul and Tokyo under the Korea Foundation and SSRC/JSPS research fellowships. She received her BA in East Asian Studies from Columbia in 2002.
Rachel Staum Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki and Haruo Shirane
Rachel Staum received her B.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard College (2009). Before coming to Columbia, she worked as a Coordinator for International Relations in Takaoka, Japan.
Rafal Stepien Chinese Religion
Advisor: Chun-fang Yu
Rafal Stepien received his first B.A., with a double-major in Philosophy and English, from the University of Western Australia. He then studied Italian and Persian language and literature at the Universities of Bologna and Esfehan respectively. Following a stint working as a Persian interpreter in Afghanistan with the International Committee of the Red Cross, he gained a second B.A., this time in Chinese from the University of Oxford, during which time he also spent a period of study at Peking University. Following this, he received an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on classical Persian Sufi poetry.
In 2009 Rafal began his Ph.D. program at Columbia, where he is the Cihui Foundation Faculty Fellow in Chinese Buddhism. He is concerned with poetry as a vehicle for spiritual insight. More specifically, his research, while based primarily within the field of Chinese Buddhism, seeks to explore the intersections between Buddhist poetry in Chinese and Sanskrit and Islamic Sufi poetry in Arabic and Persian.
Ariel Stilerman Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Ariel Stilerman received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (2002) and his M.A. in Japanese Studies (Literature) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2006) with a dissertation on the role of prose contexts in the construction of the traditional poetic canon. He taught Statistics at the University of Buenos Aires (2003-4) and trained in the Tea Ceremony at Urasenke Konnichian, Kyoto (2006-7). He specializes in premodern Japanese literature with a view on completing a thesis on the interaction of poetry and prose in poetic anthologies, narrative, drama, travel diaries, and hybrid genres. He has interest in translating classical Japanese texts into Spanish to help further develop the field of Japanese studies in Latin America and Spain, where he resided for two years. He regularly contributes articles on gastronomic culture to Vinos & Sabores magazine. He sailed competitively while in college and still dreams of one day crossing the Atlantic ocean under sail.
Myra Sun Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Myra received her B.A. in English and Chinese Language from UC Berkeley (2007). Before coming to Columbia in 2009, she worked for two years in Nara, Japan as an assistant language teacher with the JET program. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and a fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her current research explores issues of intellectual and creative labor, textual authority, and literary practice in late Qing and early Republican China. Her dissertation project will focus on the influences of editing and early 20th century new media on the formation and canonization of modern Chinese literature. She is also broadly interested in Chinese theater and performance, film, and media culture from the late 19th century to the present.
Takai Shiho Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Shiho Takai received her B.A. from University of Tokyo (2004) in British Area Studies and her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis (2006) in Japanese Literature before joining the Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Her general research interests include gender, genre, performance, reception, supernaturals, censorship, and the formation of cultural legends and heroes. She is now working on her dissertation project on the Edo period theater and law, especially representation of criminal women in sewamono jÅruri puppet plays and kabuki, and their relation to the contemporary socio-legal establishment.
Luke Thompson Japanese Religion
Advisor: Bernard Faure
Luke Thompson is a Ph.D. student majoring in East Asian Buddhism. He received a B.A. in Japanese Language and Culture from Antioch College (2002) and his M.A. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Bristol, England, in 2007. At Bristol his studies focused on Theravāda Buddhism and Classical Sanskrit, and his M.A. dissertation explored the concept of saddhā in both Pali canonical texts and the Theravāda commentarial tradition. His primary research interest is Buddhism in the Nara area during the late Heian and Kamakura periods. His dissertation focuses on changing conceptions of Śākyamuni among certain Nara monks (e.g., Jōkei 貞慶, Myōe 明恵, Eison 叡尊) and seeks to understand this trend both as part of the Nara Buddhist revival that took place during the early Kamakura period and as reflecting larger intellectual historical changes of the period. He is also interested in pre-modern Japanese conceptions of India, the development of the sangoku 三国 worldview, the writings of Heian and Kamakura-period Japanese monks abroad (e.g., Keisei 慶政, Jōjin 成尋, Shunjō 俊芿), and Theravāda Buddhism in pre-colonial Sri Lanka.
Stacey Van Vleet Tibetan History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Stacey is a PhD candidate in the History-East Asia program. Her work focuses on the modern history of Tibet (seventeenth to early twentieth centuries) and on the regional significance of Tibetan Buddhist institutions and epistemic order within the context of Qing imperial social order. Her dissertation is planned as an intellectual and institutional history of Tibetan monastic medical colleges founded between 1696 and 1916 in Tibet, Mongolia and China. Stacey received her AB in Public Policy Studies from Duke University in 2000 and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 (with an MA thesis that looked at two Tibetan rock bands in Lhasa). She has conducted research within India, Nepal, Tibet and China since 1998, and pursued full-time study at Tibet University in Lhasa from 2004-2006. She is a collaborating scholar at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and has also worked as a translator, on a forthcoming book of seventeenth-century Tibetan medical paintings, at the Arura Tibetan Traditional Medicine Research Center in Xining, Qinghai province, PRC.
Tyler Walker Japanese Literature
Advisor: Paul Anderer
Tyler received his B.A. in Japanese Studies from Middlebury College (2008), following which he spent a year working as a translator in Hiroshima, Japan. He has since taught Japanese language in Massachusetts and in his native Mississippi. Tyler has worked on the intersection of radical politics and art that characterized the emerging agrarian and proletarian literature movements of the Taishō period. An avid hiker who loves traveling the Japanese countryside, Tyler ultimately hopes to explore new critical approaches to rural and regional literature to gain insight into the fascinating relationship between country and city in 20th century Japan.
Wang Sixiang Korean History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko
Sixiang is a PhD student studying pre-Modern Korean history. His research interest is Korea's relations with China, especially during the ChosÅn period. He received his BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (2006).
Yijun Wang Chinese History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko
Yijun is a doctorial student in Chinese history. Her interest lies in material culture, gender, economic, and legal history of late Imperial China. Her research concerns the networks, negotiations, and exchanges of power and status that lies behind the making, circulation and consumption of objects. More broadly, she is interested in the discussion of the state-and-society and private-and-public spheres in the late Imperial China through the perspective of material culture. She received her BA in history from Tsinghua University in Beijing (2010) and her MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (2012).
Chelsea Zi Wang Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Chelsea Wang received her BA in History from the University of British Columbia (2009) and started PhD studies at Columbia in 2009. Her research interests include the histories of space, book culture, and information transmission in late imperial China. Specifically, her dissertation explores how the literati senses of space were shaped by transportation and information networks during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). More broadly, Chelsea is interested in incorporating comparative East Asian perspectives into the study of Chinese history. You can view my personal academic blog here.
Charles Woolley Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Despite hailing from Upstate New York, Charles Woolley headed north to receive his B.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto (2007), after the completion of which he was briefly repatriated before being granted the opportunity to research the development, establishment and institutionalization of the 'family restaurant' format within popular culinary culture in Japan under the auspices of the Fulbright U.S. Student Program (2007-2008). In 2008, he was admitted to Columbia's Ph.D. program in Japanese Literature where he continues to explore his interests in the processes of trans-contextual translation and adaptation between the 'West' and Japan and their roles in the construction and elaboration of new linguistic and discursive idioms in the early twentieth century.
Wu Lan Tibetan Studies
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
WU Lan is a doctoral candidate in Tibetan history in the History-East Asian program. She is presently completing her dissertation research on religious networks during the Qing (1644-1911). Her research concerns the role of a cluster of Tibetan Buddhist incarnate lamas in the formation of the Qing empire during the eighteenth century.
Minna Wu Chinese History
Advisor: Feng Li
Minna Wu received her B.A. (1999) and M.A. (2002) from Peking University and currently is a Ph.D. candidate in early Chinese history at Columbia University. During this academic year, she is conducting dissertation research in China with the support of a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Research Fellowship in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology and Early History. Her dissertation ,'€œOn the Periphery of a Great '€˜Empire'€™: Secondary Formation of States and Their Material Basis in the Shandong Peninsula during the Late Bronze Age: ca.1045-500 B.C.E.'€, focuses on social change in the polities of the late bronze age on the Shandong peninsular and their trajectories toward statehood.
Xiong Lu Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Xiong Lu is a PhD student specializing in the pre-modern Chinese novel and its history. She came to Columbia in 2008, and works with Prof. Shang Wei. She received her M.A. degree from Beijing University in comparative literature. Her M.A. thesis focused on the canonization of classical Chinese novels (late 19th century~1920s), when the genre of novels (Chin. xiaoshuo) witnessed a dramatic transformation due to the modernization of the novel as well as literature more broadly. Her current plan for the PhD program is to examine the rise of the novel as a literary genre in modern China. By reexamining the complicated literary, media, cultural and institutional context of the late Qing period, she hopes to rethink the problematic of the modernization of the Chinese novel as an important part of the process of nation-building. In addition, she is attempting to rethink the connection between classical and modern Chinese novels in an effort to trace the narrative tradition and to see them as a single '€œwhole'€, which sheds light on the future of the novel in China.
Zi Yan Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Before coming to Columbia, Zi Yan received her B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Literature from Peking University in 2008 and 2011. Her M.A. thesis focuses on new transportation vehicles described in modern Chinese fiction. She concentrates on the new landscape provided by new vehicles and analyzes the change of interpersonal relationship between passengers. Her research interests include modern Chinese literature, urban culture, and the relationship between the history of material and science and modern Chinese literature.
Christina Yi Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki and Theodore Hughes
Christina Yi graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in Japanese Language & Literature. Shortly after graduation, she left for Japan on the JET Program, working as a Coordinator for International Relations at Hamamatsu City Hall. She entered the Japanese Literature Ph.D. program at Columbia in 2007. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding "national" and "ethnic minority" literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is particularly interested in the relationship between nihongo bungaku (Japanese-language literature) and kokubungaku (Japanese national literature) vis-Ã -vis the canonization(s) of zainichi Korean literature(s).
Chi Zhang Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Chi is a PhD student in Japanese Literature, with interests broadly centered on the construction of China in the Japanese literary and cultural imagination, including the transformation of Chinese philosophical and religious writings in Japanese literature and the use of different genres in the depiction of Chinese images, and the ways in which different Japanese genres bonded with specific Chinese "sources" or genres, mostly from the Heian through the medieval period. She is also interested in examining the Edo period in which a number of earlier threads of Japanese cultural and discursive constructions of China were first brought together and emerged within a range of new forms of writing and texts. Chi received her B.A. in Japanese Language from Tsinghua University, Beijing before joining Columbia.
Jing Zhang Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Zhang Jing joined the department as a Ph.D student in Modern Chinese History in 2010. Before coming here, she studied Chinese Literature in Peking University and Chinese history in National University of Singapore.Her research interest lies in urban society, popular culture, everyday lives of Asian countries, especially those of China. She plans to study public rumors surrounding political celebrities and public affairs in urban Shanghai from late Qing to Republican era.
Zhang Li Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Zhang Li received his BA in Chinese Literature from Peking University (2006) and MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London (2007). He is now a PhD student in modern Chinese literature at Columbia and a member of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. His research interests include the interaction between science, technology and late imperial/early modern Chinese literature, modern Chinese poetry and colonialism and literature in East Asia.
Zhong Yurou Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Zhong Yurou is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature as well as a fellow in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. She received her B. A. from Tsinghua University, Beijing before joining Columbia. Her research concerns the history of Chinese language and literacy reforms, the emergence of modern Chinese literature, and translation theory. Her dissertation project investigates the transnational making of modern Chinese language and social reforms in the early 20th century.
Dongxin Zou Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Dongxin Zou is a doctoral student in modern Chinese history, with interests in medicine and science, Cold War politics, and China's relations with the Middle Eastern and North African countries in the post-colonial world. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Arabic Language & Culture from Beijing Foreign Studies University where upon graduation she worked as a lecturer in Arabic for three years. Prior to entering Columbia, she earned M.A. in History from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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