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Congratulations to these EALAC Undergraduate Students!

Please join us in congratulating Anthony Costanzo, William Yuen Yee, and Allyssa Phelps on these fantastic achievements! To see the full article from Columbia News, please visit this link.

Allyssa Phelps CC’21 has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student grant! 

Allyssa, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated with a major in History and a concentration in East Asian Studies. She looks forward to teaching as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Taiwan. She hopes to continue fostering her academic interests in modern urban history and Mandarin during her time in Taiwan.

William Yuen Yee CC’22 has been awarded the 2022 Critical Language Scholarship and named Michel-David Weill Scholar!


William Yuen Yee, CC’22, graduated from Columbia University with a double major in Political Science and East Asian Studies. Originally from Porter Ranch, CA, William is currently researching U.S.-China policy for Dean Thomas Christensen and writing analysis pieces on China’s foreign relations. In Indonesia, he is excited to further explore ways to strengthen the U.S.-Indonesia relationship and the nation’s dynamic leadership role in the Indo-Pacific. After CLS, he will pursue a master’s degree at the Paris School of International Affairs as the 2022 Michel David-Weill Scholarship laureate, where he will study international trade and the broader U.S.-EU-Asian triangular relationship.

Anthony Costanzo GS’23 has been awarded the 2022 Critical Language Scholarship!

Anthony is a rising senior from Portland, OR who is pursuing a double-major in Political Science and East Asian Studies. In addition to studying East Asian Security and Chinese Foreign Policy, he seeks to deconstruct contemporary Chinese strategic decision-making by analyzing China’s domestic political environment, socio-cultural idiosyncrasies, and historical memories. This summer, Anthony will be attending National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan, for an eight-week intensive Mandarin course through the Critical Language Scholarship. He hopes to apply the linguistic, regional, and cultural insights derived from this experience toward the pursuit of working for the State Department in the future.

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Xinyi Zhao (趙心怡)

Xinyi Zhao (趙心怡)

Field: Japanese Cinema and Literature
Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: xz2468@columbia.edu

Xinyi Zhao is a doctoral candidate in East Asian cinema and media. An interdisciplinary researcher by training, she aims to reappraise the history of East Asian cinema through underexplored historiographies: transnational, media archaeological, and feminist. Her dissertation, “Cinema as a Quest for Modernity: Film Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)lives of Manchukuo,” engages with the discursive and social formations of cinema in the Japanese “puppet state” within a larger regional and global media environment. This project has been supported by Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and Donald Keene Research Grant in Japanese Studies. Her additional research areas include the intersection of affect theory and Japanese New Wave cinema and the translation of Japanese film theory in Republican China.

Xinyi co-translated with Jianqing Chen Thomas Elsaesser’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2009) into Chinese (under contract with Peking University Press). Her recent work on Japan’s first female director, Sakane Tazuko, appears in The Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism (forthcoming).

Xinyi received her M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University (2017), M.A. in Chinese Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2014), and Joint B.A. in Economics and Japanese from Shanghai International Studies University (2012).

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