Lin Hsin-Yi

Field: Chinese Religion
Advisors: Bernard Faure & Zhaohua Yang
Email: hl2555@columbia.edu

 

 

 

Hsin-Yi Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese religion and Buddhism, with a special interest in the interaction between Buddhism and Daoism, and between religion and gender in the medieval China. Her dissertation topic is on reproduction and medieval Chinese Buddhism, discussing the religious notions, metaphors, and practices surrounding childbirth and their interrelation with Chinese conceptions of the body, gender, birth, and life. She is the author of the book, The Decline of Dharma and Women’s Beliefs in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Taipei: Dao Shiang Press, 2008), and has published articles on medieval Chinese religion and gender. Before joining in Columbia at 2009, She has received her B.A. (2003) and M.A.(2007) in History from National Taiwan University. She is also the awardee of Taiwan Government’s Scholarship, Chung-hwa Buddhist Institute Research Fellowship, and China Times Cultural Foundation Young Scholar Award.

Jonathan Kief

Field: Korean Literature
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Email: jk2336@columbia.edu

 

 

 

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.

Thomas Gaubatz

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisors: Haruo Shirane & Tomi Suzuki
Email: tmg2130@columbia.edu
 

 

 

 

Thomas is a Ph.D. candidate in early modern Japanese literature at Columbia University. His dissertation examines literary representations of chonin (urban commoner) identity in relation to shifts in the administrative policy, print and performance media, and urban space of early modern Japan. His research interests include early modern book history and print culture, especially commercial publishing and the woodblock print as media; social history, urban space, and the Edo-Meiji transition.