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.
Ramona Bajema Japanese History
Advisor: Carol Gluck
Ramona Bajema entered Columbia University's EALAC program in Modern Japanese History in 2005. After completing a year of research at Waseda University in Tokyo, she is now in the writing stage of her dissertation. Ramona's research concerns Japanese artists who were active within the American art world prior to World War II. Her work addresses issues central to cosmopolitanism, immigration history, and the production of culture, as she seeks to understand how border-crossing artists participated in prewar global modernism. She received her B.A. from University of California, Berkeley in Japanese Studies in 1999 and her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in International Relations and Economics and Japan Studies in 2004.
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.
Rebecca Best Tibetan History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Becky Best received her B.A. cum laude with distinction in Religious Studies at Yale University (2005) and an M.A. in Regional Studies: East Asia at Columbia University (2009). In 2004 she studied in Lhasa with support from a Richter Fellowship and returned the next year as a foreign student at Tibet University. In 2008 she studied in Beijing and Inner Mongolia with a Weatherhead Training Grant. She is currently completing coursework in the Ph.D. program on Sino-Tibetan history, with a focus on the role of religion. Her research interests include masked dance, magic and methods of material history.
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.
Adam Bronson Japanese History
Advisor: Carol Gluck
Adam Bronson received his BA from Chicago (2005) and is currently an ABD doctoral candidate in the History-East Asia program. He is currently writing a dissertation in the field of modern Japanese history on critics and intellectuals associated with the influential post-WWII journal Science of Thought. His research explores issues related to Americanization, the Cold War, mass culture, and competing visions of scientific modernity in the aftermath of world war. He recently presented a section of his dissertation entitled "Philosophical Youth as a Social Problem: Science of Thought and Kyoto School Criticism" at Waseda University.
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:
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.
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 research interests include Fascist modernism, ethnic nationalist literature, and representations of technology and mechanical animation in early modern China. I anticipate writing my dissertation on Chinese literature and translation of the 1940s and 50s. Specifically, by examining the reconfigurations of China's literary relations with Japan, Russia, and the post-Bandung "Third World," my dissertation will look at Chinese writers' participation in the broader midcentury development of a self-avowedly Third World and postcolonial literature.
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: David Lurie & Haruo Shirane
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.
Hino Takuya Japanese Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Takuya Hino is a Ph.D. student with a focus in East Asian Buddhism. Originally from Japan, he received a B.A. in Chemistry (with a minor in Religion) from Pacific Lutheran University and a M.A. (with honors) in Buddhist Studies from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley) before coming to Columbia. His research focuses on the history and doctrine of a particular sub-branch of Japanese esoteric (or Tantric) Buddhism-the Tachikawa-ry^u-during the (Japanese) medieval period. His broader research interests include the relationship between science and religion, Christian-Buddhist dialogue, Christian and Buddhist ethics, Buddhism and psychology, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, Daoism, Shugend^o, Shinto, Buddhist literature, anime depictions of Japanese religion, late Heian (1086-1150) Japanese political history, and Japanese imperialism.
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.
Sara Kile Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
I am a doctoral candidate in premodern Chinese literature, currently completing my dissertation on cultural production in the early Qing using the case of the audacious cultural entrepreneur Li Yu (1611-1680). I examine Li Yu’s unconventional cultural entrepreneurship and his literary production to show how his representations of space, vision, and bodies challenged readers to envisage new potential for the material world, social and economic status, and the discursive production of embodied experience. I received my BA from Beloit College and spent one year as a visiting student in the Chinese Department at Peking University before entering the graduate program at Columbia.
Kim Sujung Chinese and Korean Religion
Advisor: Chun-fang Yu
Sujung Kim completed her M.A. in the philosophy department at Korea University in 2007. During her M.A. program, she focused on learning Indian Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist classical languages. Her thesis was about the concept of upāya in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. She has started her doctorate program at Columbia University in 2007 Fall. Currently, she is interested in Korean Esoteric Buddhism in East Asian Buddhist context. For her doctoral work, she plans to research various aspects of Korean Esoteric Buddhism from the Silla period to the Koryŏ (8-14CE) in relation to Chinese Esoteric Buddhism and Japanese Esoteric Buddhism.
Nicole Kwoh Chinese History
Advisor:
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 Science & Art History. She cultivated her interest in political history, modern law and material culture as a research fellow at the National Palace 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).
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.
Lin Shing-Ting Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Shing-Ting Lin is a doctoral student in modern Chinese history, working under the guidance of Professors Dorothy Ko and Eugenia Lean. Before coming to Columbia in 2007, 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 the history of science and medicine in late imperial and modern China. She is currently preparing her dissertation research on the professionalization of Chinese medical women in relation to the history of gynecology and obstetrics, as well as the popular and medical understandings of female bodies in the late Qing and early Republican period (1860-1930).
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
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 PangJapanese Religion
Advisor:
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.
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: TBA
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.
Shibayama Saeko Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
A native of Nagoya, Saeko received her B.A. from International Christian University, Tokyo and her M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. Before turning to Japanese literature and entering EALAC in 2004, she studied Yiddish language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her dissertation examines the evolution of waka as a scholastic discipline in the twelfth century.
Closely reading discursive texts (commentaries, treaties, glossaries, anthologies, judges' comments from poetry contests and the inventory of a monastic library), she discusses the revival of the genre during a tumultuous period of rule by retired emperors. The recipient of a Shincho fellowship, she worked in Tokyo 2007-09.
Shim Mi-Ryong Modern Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
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.
Nathan Shockey Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki & Paul Anderer
Nathan Shockey is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Japanese Literature currently completing his dissertation, entitled "Literary Writing, Print Media, and Urban Space in Early 20th Century Japan." His research examines how ideas and practices of reading and writing changed in tandem with the large-scale proliferation of books, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of typographic text in the first decades of the 20th century. The project addresses the shifting role of literature vis-a-vis the rise of urban consumer mass society in Japan. More broadly, he is interested in the aesthetic, political, and philosophical repercussions of the advent of new forms of media. Nathan also holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. from Waseda University.
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 Chinese and English from UC Berkeley (2007). Before coming to Columbia in 2009, she worked for two years as an assistant language teacher on the JET program in Nara, Japan. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and a fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research interests include narratology, image and text, new media forms, and autobiographical constructions in fiction and film.
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. Before relocating to Manhattan in the autumn of 2007, he received a B.A. in Japanese Language and Culture from Antioch College (2002) and a M.A. (first class honors with distinction, 2007) in Buddhist Studies from the University of Bristol, England; at the latter institution his studies focused on Theravada Buddhism and Classical Sanskrit. His primary research interest is Buddhist doctrinal transformation during the Kamakura period, particularly amongst the so-called Nara schools, or Nanto-bukkyo. His broader academic interests include Japanese esoteric Buddhism, the social and doctrinal history of Theravada Buddhism, Buddhist intellectual history, Japanese dietary and agricultural history, and the history of Western Religious Studies.
Dominique Townsend Tibetan History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Dominique Townsend completed a BA in Religion from Barnard College in 1999 and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 2006. Since then she has been pursuing her PhD at Columbia. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies she lived and worked in Tibetan Buddhist communities in Nepal, India and Tibet. Dominique's main area of study is Tibetan Buddhism, with a focus on aesthetics and high culture in traditional Tibet. Her research is on the Mindrolling monastic lineage, founded in the late 17th Century. Mindrolling is famous for its literary, musical and visual arts traditions as well as ties to Tibetan government and aristocracy. Dominique's proposed dissertation title is A Field of Elegance: Mindrolling as Arbiter of Tibetan Buddhist High Culture and Aesthetics .
Brian Tsui Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Brian Tsui, who received his B.A. from the University of Hong Kong, studies modern Chinese history, fascist politics, pan-Asianism, and Sino-Indian relations. His dissertation project focuses on the ideologies and practices of China's '€œconservative revolution,'€ with a view to teasing out the Nationalist regime's peculiar approaches to dealing with the dual challenges of capitalist globalization and Communist revolution.
Robert Tuck Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
I specialize in 19th and 20th century Japanese literature, especially the works of Masaoka Shiki. My dissertation, '€œMasaoka Shiki and the Literature of Dialogue: Media, Sociality and Mass Participation'€, traces a major shift in the underpinnings of literary writing during Meiji. Focusing on Shiki and the literary groups and publications with which he was associated during his career, I argue that early Meiji socio-literary practice was structured around social and dialogic poetic exchange, especially within the kanshibun genres and among those who had had a kanbun kyÅiku education. During Shiki's career and especially after the Sino-Japanese war, this notion of social dialogue increasingly gave way to a conception of poetry as practiced, read and digested in the pages of the mass-circulation print media, especially the newspaper Nihon; and the literary magazine Hototogisu study of the poets gathering around the latter two publications and their impact on the Meiji literary world makes up the latter half of the dissertation.
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.
Paul Vogt Chinese History
Advisor: Feng Li
Nick Vogt is a doctoral candidate in pre-Qin Chinese history, working mainly with bronze inscriptions and received textual sources of the Western Zhou era. His research interests include the archaeology of religion, the processes of enculturation and legitimation, the materialization of social relations, and the development of ancient historiography. His dissertation is concerned with the social aspects of ritual action in the Western Zhou historical context. Nick holds a B.A. in Chinese from Dartmouth and an M.A./M.Phil from Columbia; he also completed two years of graduate study at Stanford.
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's interests include the work of contemporary authors such as Murakami Ryu and Machida Kou.
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).
Chelsea Zi Wang Chinese Literature
Advisor: Robert Hymes
I started my doctoral studies in 2009 after completing a BA (2009) in History at the University of British Columbia. My interests lie in intellectual history and the history of books in later imperial China (12-18th century). Particularly, I would like to explore how conventions of writing and reading influenced the way China's literate elites chose to express their thoughts. As a tentative dissertation project, I am currently exploring the cultural significance of literary collections (wenji), an important avenue with which many elites sought to circulate and preserve their writing. More broadly, I am interested in incorporating comparative East Asian perspectives into the study of Chinese history. Besides looking at old Chinese books, I enjoy learning Korean, studying classical Japanese, and in my spare time, playing go (a.k.a. weiqi/paduk).
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: TBA
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).
Sun Yoo Korean History
Advisor: Dorothy Ko
Sun Yoo is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Korean history, interested in cultural history of Choson through the lens of literary and material culture. More specifically, she is interested in analyzing the network of creative industry inspired by Choson novels as a way of understanding how people perceived text within the period's sociopolitical and culture milieu. Sun received her B.A. in Art History and Economics from Wellesley College, M.A. in Visual Arts Administration from NYU, and M.A. in EALAC-Korean History from Columbia.
Yoshio Hitomi Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Hitomi received her B.A. in English at Yale University (2001) and an M.A. in English at the University of Tokyo (2005). She is now a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines Japanese literary modernism from the interrelated perspectives of gender, urban space and translation culture, in the context of the developing publishing industry and mass media in the 1920s and 30s. She is currently in Japan doing her dissertation research at Waseda University (2009-10).
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 student 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.
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