Recent Alumni

Nicolle Bertozzi, PhD
Field: Japanese History
Joan Mirviss Art Gallery; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Lu Ban’s Ruler and Shōtoku’s Saw: An Intellectual History of Carpentry in Premodern Japan

David Borgonjon, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Dissertation Title: Red Nanyang: Chinese-Language Literature of Indonesia, 1945-1965

Cameron Foltz, PhD
Field: Tibetan Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Constructing Qinghai: Pastoralist Settlement, Monastic Territorialization, and State Incorporation (1724–1935)

Guoying Gong, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Writing Home and Empire from the Margins: Longing and Belonging in Du Fu’s (712-770) Poetry

Palden Gyal, PhD
Field: Tibetan Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow, University Committee on Asia and the Middle East, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Shifting Terrains of Authority: Religio-Political Governance in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, 1650-1911

Tenggeer Hao, PhD
Field: Chinese Film and Media
Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU Shanghai
Dissertation Title: The Mind Medium: A Yin-Yang Philosophy of Mind and Media

Tianyuan Huang, PhD
Field: Japanese History
Assistant Professor, Center for Integrated Japanese Studies, Tohoku University
Dissertation Title: Making Way for Uncertainty: Gender, Power, and the Epistemology of Illness in Japan, 1585–1953

Stella Kim, PhD
Field: Korean History
Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley
Dissertation Title: Embodied Belongings: Gender, Reproduction, and Motherhood in Late Chosŏn Korea

Maho Miyazaki, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature
Research Associate, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan
Dissertation Title: Aged to Perfection: Performing Old Age and the Elderly Actor in Noh Theater

Deanna Nardy, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature and Media
Postdoctoral Fellow, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University; Assistant Professor, Florida State University, beginning August 2026
Dissertation Title: Countervisions of Postwar Japan

Komei Sakai, PhD
Field: Japanese Religion
Dissertation Title: Wrath of the Rising Sun: The Gods of War and Military Rituals in Pre-Modern Japan

Siwei Wang, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Graduate Student, Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Dissertation Title: New Storm from Latin America: Staging Cuban Revolution in Socialist China

Liu Xuan, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Assistant Professor, Beijing Normal University
Dissertation Title: Strategizing Kinship: Elites, Lineage Practices, and the Political Changes in Early China (c. 1045-453 BCE)

Xinyi Zhao, PhD
Field: Japanese Film and Media
Assistant Professor, Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore
Dissertation Title: A National Cinema in Search of a Nation: Media Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)Lives of Manchuria, 1900s-1940s

Nolan Bensen, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Adjunct Lecturer, City College of New York
Dissertation Title: The Tripod of Ming Foreign Policy: Land Borders, State Language Training, and Maritime Borders in the Long Shadow of the Mongol Empire

Stephen (Hyoseak) Choi, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature
Postdoctoral Fellow, Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies; Assistant Professor, Shirayuri University
Dissertation Title: Literary Dependents: The Child and Publishing Culture in Modern Japan

Tenzin Yewong Dongchung, PhD
Field: Tibetan Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University
Dissertation Title: Wood Carvers and Deep Forests: The Expansion of Tibetan-Language Woodblock Printing Houses (1642-1900)

Christopher Kim, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Visiting Assistant Professor, New York University
Dissertation Title: The Rise of Territorial States in Early China: Institutional Organization and Economic Integration in the State of Qi, ca. 1040–221 BCE

Ekaterina Komova, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature
Postdoctoral Fellow, Donald Keene Center, Columbia University; Postdoctoral Fellow, Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies
Dissertation Title: Remaining Beautiful in Death: On the Affect of Dying and Mourning in the “Genji monogatari”

Meng-Heng Lee, PhD
Field: Korean Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia
Dissertation Title: Chinese Law and Korean Practice: Illegal Border-Crossing and Suppressing Catholicism in Late Chosŏn Korea (1791–1846)

Isaac Tan, PhD
Field: Japanese History
Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Blood and Empire: The Emergence of Hemotypology (Blood-Group Studies) in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Shih-han Wang, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Research Fellow, Department of Antiquities, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Dissertation Title: Elites in Between: Elite Formation and Cultural Interaction in Bronze Age Lower Yangtze (ca. 1300–350 BCE)

Yingchuan Yang, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
Dissertation Title: Revolution on the Air: Radio and the Mass Technology of Chinese Socialism

Yifan Zhang, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Postdoctoral Fellow, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Local Airs of Sensation: Feng Menglong's (1574-1646) Mountain Songs and the Fashionable Language of Suzhou

Zachary Berge-Becker, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, 2022–2024
Dissertation Title: Arts, Leisure, and the Construction of “Gentlemanly” (shi 士) Identities in 7th–14th Century China

Michelle Hauk, PhD
Field: Japanese History
Assistant Professor, Washington University in St. Louis
Dissertation Title: Dwelling with Water: Tokyo Waterworks and the Remaking of the Urban Home, 1890–1990

Peter Moody, PhD
Field: Korean History
Professorial Lecturer, Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and Visiting Scholar, George Washington University
Dissertation Title: Music, Politics, and Indigenization in the DPRK (1945–1991)

Qichen (Barton) Qian, PhD
Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Dissertation Title: Benign Bellicosity: Tibetan Military History and the Making of Ganden Podrang 1642–1793

Nataly Shahaf, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Postdoctoral Fellow, Davis Center and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University
Dissertation Title: Multiple Exposures: Ghosts, Buddhism, and Visual Heritage in Early Twentieth–Century China

Riga Shakya, PhD
Field: Tibetan Studies
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stony Brook University
Dissertation Title: Mirrors of History: The Poetics of the Tibetan Kingdom in the Time of Empire (1728-1750)

Oliver White, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature
Specially Appointed Faculty, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
Dissertation Title: Layers of Laughter: Investigating the Appeal of Jippensha Ikku’s Hizakurige, an Early Modern Japanese Bestseller

Harlan Chambers, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Researcher in Chinese Studies, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Dissertation Title: Revolutionary Times: Temporalities of Mobilization and Narrative in China’s Revolution

Sau-Yi Fong, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Academic Director, MARSEA, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Dissertation Title: Guns, Boats, and Diplomacy: Late Qing China and the World’s Naval Technology

Yuki Ishida, PhD
Field: Japanese Literature
Visiting Assistant Professor, Kenyon College, 2023–2026; Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico, beginning August 2026
Dissertation Title: Envisioning Literary Modernity through Translation: Futabatei Shimei and the Formation of Modern Literary Discourse in 1880s–1910s Japan

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes, PhD
Field: Japanese History
Independent Scholar
Dissertation Title: Flowers on the Battlefield: Intimacy and Hierarchy in the Construction of Japanese Warrior Masculinities, 1507–1636

Tracy Stilerman, PhD
Field: Tibetan Studies
Lecturer and Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University
Dissertation Title: Contextualizing Place Writing in Tibet: The Gelukpa Rewriting of the Buddhist Landscape in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Dongming Wu, PhD
Field: Chinese History
Assistant Professor, University of Macau
Dissertation Title: The Bronze Economy and the Making of the Southern Borderlands under the Zhou Dynasty (1045-256 BCE)

Chung-Wei Yang, PhD
Field: Chinese Literature
Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica
Dissertation Title: Pictorials and the Transformation of Chinese Fiction in the Era of Photolithography (1900-1910)