Andrea Castiglioni Pre-Modern Japanese Buddhism
ac2938@columbia.edu
Andrea Castiglioni is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion interested in the ascetic practices of the Dewasanzan Shugendo tradition in the late Tokugawa period. In summer 2011, he did fieldwork at Dewasanzan and Ominesan in order to study written sources and contemporary rituals about the Shugendo practices and ceremonial procedures. The results of this research will be included in his doctoral dissertation, which is focused on the Shugendo discourse about self-immolation of the body, hermeneutics of death, and soteriological simbology.

Jian Ming Chang East Asian Languages & Culture
jcc2174@columbia.edu
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.

Carrie Cushman East Asian Languages & Culture
clc2195@columbia.edu
Carrie Cushman is a PhD student in the History of Art and Archaeology Department interested in issues of originality and tradition in post-war Japanese architectural discourse and practice. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the exhibition house and garden, Shōfusō (originally exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1954), as a means of examining the role of the traditional Japanese vernacular within Modern architectural practice and discourse in the West.

Frank Feltens Art History & Archeology
ff2209@columbia.edu
Frank Feltens is a Ph.D. student in the history of Japanese art. He received his B.A. in Japanese Studies from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent a year at Kyoto University as an undergraduate. His main research focuses are Momoyama and Edo period painting (particularly Rinpa) and its links with theater and classical literature. In this context, he tries to draw connections between practices in the consumption and understanding of classical literature (e.g. through Noh theater, digests or renga manuals) and art in these periods. His other interests include medieval depictions of classical themes, premodern art criticism and intersections between different artistic media.

Chien Wen Kung History
ck2567@columbia.edu
Born in Singapore, Chien Wen Kung graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College, where he majored in History and English. Before coming to Columbia, he worked as a defence policy officer in the Singapore Ministry of Defence and taught A-Level Southeast Asian history at his high school alma mater. His research interests include American foreign policy in East and Southeast Asia and transnational right-wing movements during the Cold War. He enjoys computer games and supports Liverpool Football Club.

Andrew Macomber Religion
acm2199@columbia.edu

Pau Pitarch Fernandez East Asian Languages & Cultures
pp2344@columbia.edu
Doctoral student in Japanese Literature. His research deals with the interplay between aesthetics and scientific discourse in the early 20th century and the uses of "illness" as a literary and ideological trope. He spent two months in Beijing this past summer to attend an intensive Chinese language course.

Helen Qiu East Asian Languages & Cultures
hjq2103@columbia.edu
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.

Nathan Shockey East Asian Languages & Cultures
nps2105@columbia.edu

Ariel Stilerman East Asian Languages & Cultures
ags2141@columbia.edu
Ariel Stilerman is a doctoral student of premodern Japanese literature at the East Asian Languages and Cultures department. His research focuses on the roles played by prose-poetry configurations in the development of Japanese prose, poetry, and drama. He spent nine weeks in Tokyo last summer taking courses on poetry and poetic discourse at Waseda University, and researching prose-poetry hybrid genres.

Myra Sun East Asian Languages & Cultures
mms2213@columbia.edu

Luke Thompson East Asian Languages & Cultures
lnt2106@columbia.edu
Luke Thompson is a doctoral student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.  His research focuses on Japanese Buddhism of the tenth to fourteenth centuries.  He is currently completing his last year of coursework.  In his dissertation he hopes to examine early medieval Japanese Buddhist devotion to Shakyamuni and contemporaneous Japanese views of India.  He plans to further elucidate connections between this phenomenon and the cult of the deity Sannô.  Last summer he conducted preliminary research here in the US with the help of a Weatherhead PhD Training Grant.

Robert Tuck East Asian Languages & Cultures
rjt2110@columbia.edu
Rob Tuck is a PhD Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His main interest is the relationship between poetry, particularly haiku and poetry in literary Chinese (kanshi), and print media in 19th and 20th century Japan. He has performed research in Japan both on the role of kanshi in early Meiji newspapers and on different forms of haiku media, examining in particular the largely ignored publications of so-called 'old-school' haikai masters. Using this data, he is writing a dissertation which will draw attention to the importance of poetic genres in shaping modes of cultural and literary production during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rachel Staum East Asian Languages & Cultures
rks2135@columbia.edu
Rachel Staum is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures interested in modern Japanese women's literature.  She 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.

Chelsea Zi Wang East Asian Languages & Cultures
zw2159 @columbia.edu
Chelsea Zi Wang is a PhD student in premodern Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the relationship between writing conventions and intellectual history in China around 12th to 18th century. As a tentative dissertation project, she is currently exploring the cultural significance of literary collections (wenji), an important avenue with which many elites sought to circulate and preserve their writing. With a broad interest in comparative East Asian history, Chelsea spent the summer of 2010 at Sogang University in Korea, where she enrolled in an intensive Korean language program.

Sixiang Wang East Asian Languages & Cultures
sw2090@columbia.edu
A doctoral student in History of East Asia doing reseach on Korean relations with China in the Early Modern Period. His research will be focused on cultural aspects of the relationship, especially the role that the exchange of knowledge and the production of literary works played in diplomacy. His dissertation will look at these issues for the Koryo-Choson transition, with an emphasis on how Korea negotiated its position vis-a-vis the Yuan and Ming Empires.

Charles Woolley East Asian Languages and Cultures
cew2131@columbia.edu
A Doctoral student in Japanese literature, Charles' research interests focus on the writing of exotic topography and foreign topoi in literature from the late eighteenth century onward and  its dynamic relationship to media, genre, and negotiating representational language and its conventions within broader contexts of reading, writing, and geographical displacement. During the summer he alternatively devoted time to ongoing translations of Hiraga Gennai's Fūryū Shidōkenden and Nagai Kafū's Furansu monogatari, in addition to developing with greater precision the overall shape of his dissertation project.

Lan Wu East Asian History
ulanwj@gmail.com
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.

Timothy Yang History
tmy2101@columbia.edu
Tim is a sixth-year PhD student in the Department of History. He has spent the past two years conducting research for his dissertation in Japan, China, and Taiwan. His dissertation, "The Business of Health: Japanese Pharmaceuticals, Empire, and Modern Life," explores the intersections between capitalism, medicine, and state policy through a micro-history of the preeminent drug company in East Asia in first half of the twentieth century, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals.

Lu Xiong East Asian Languages and Cultures
lx2127@columbia.edu
She 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 "whole", which sheds light on the future of the novel in China.

Tianjiao Yu East Asian Languages and Cultures
ty2193@columbia.edu

Tinghua Yu Political Science
ty2229@columbia.edu
Tinghua Yu is a first year PhD student in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests focus on comparative political economy and Chinese politics. Tinghua obtained her B.S. in Economics in 2006 from Zhejiang University, China.

Chi Zhang Japanese Literature
cz2185@columbia.edu
Chi Zhang is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, with interests broadly centered on the construction of China in the Japanese literary and cultural imagination, including 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. In particular, Chi is concerned with the relationship between "the two Chinas" – one is the elite China, as known through the Confucian classics, and the other is the China as it came to exist in the popular imagination of the Japanese. Chi received her B.A. in Japanese Language from Tsinghua University, Beijing before joining Columbia.

Jing Zhang
jz2384@columbia.edu

Li Zhang
lw2228@columbia.edu