Myra Sun

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: mms2213@columbia.edu

Myra received her B.A. in English and Chinese Language from UC Berkeley (2007). Before coming to Columbia in 2009, she worked for two years in Nara, Japan as an assistant language teacher with the JET program. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and a fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her current research explores issues of intellectual and creative labor, textual authority, and literary practice in late Qing and early Republican China. Her dissertation project will focus on the influences of editing and early 20th century new media on the formation and canonization of modern Chinese literature. She is also broadly interested in Chinese theater and performance, film, and media culture from the late 19th century to the present.

Joshua Schlachet

Field: Japanese History
Advisors: Carol Gluck & Gregory Pflugfelder
Email: jes2276@columbia.edu

 

 

 

 

Joshua Schlachet is a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current project, “Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan,” examines the emergence of a dietary “common knowledge” as new practical guidebooks circulating among ordinary readers expanded the concept of a well-nourished body to encompass economic productivity, status hierarchy, and moral cultivation. His research interests include global and comparative food studies, histories of science and health, book history and popular publishing, material culture and artisanship, and Dutch-Japanese exchange.

Schlachet teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian history, dietary cultures, and everyday life at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and holds an M.A. (Japanese Studies) from the University of Michigan and B.A. (History) from Cornell University

Kristopher Reeves

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: klr2151@columbia.edu

 

 

 

 

Kristopher is currently a PhD candidate interested in issues of literary heteroglossia, focusing primarily on Chinese-style poetry (kanshi) composed by Japanese writers in the ninth and tenth century. Kristopher seeks to draw more attention to the so-called private or family anthologies (shikashū) of Chinese-style poetry. He is currently exploring, on the one hand, ways in which these family anthologies adapted, combined, and, by interweaving poetic traditions taken over from the world of waka verse, significantly transformed earlier genres of Chinese-style poetry, and, on the other, how these literary transformations might be understood simultaneously as sociopolitical responses to different types of readers, from the exalted patron to the fellow poet.