28th Annual Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia

The Annual Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia will be held on Columbia University from February 15-16th at Kent Hall. This two-day conference provides students from institutions around the world with the opportunity to meet and share research with their peers.

Over sixty presenters and discussants will cross national, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to critically interrogate the categories that both bind and sub-divide East Asian studies. Panels will run in split sessions throughout both days, and range over an impressive variety of topics, including, “Commodities in the Global Age,” “State and Society in Imperial Japan,” “Imaging Techniques and the Birth of Modern China,” “Repressed Voices in the Second Sino-Japanese War,” “Sites of Religion in the Premodern World,” “The Politics of Performing Femininity,” and “Koreas in the Postwar World.”

This year’s keynote is given by Nicholas Bartlett, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, Barnard College. Bartlett’s keynote will contextualize his own research within the fields of China/East Asian studies, with a focus on his first book, a phenomenological exploration of long-term heroin users’ recovery from addiction in a mining community in southwest China. The opening remarks will be delivered by Paul Anderer, Mack Professor of Humanities and Professor of Japanese Literature, Columbia University. The two-day conference will conclude, as per long-standing tradition, with a celebration in C.V. Starr Library with a playlist that emphasizes East Asian pop.