JM Chris ChangField: Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email: jcc2174@columbia.edu
JM Chris Chang is a student in modern Chinese history working on the relationship between petition writing and ideological revisionism in the post-Mao transition. He received his BA from Amherst College and a dual-MA from Columbia and the London School of Economics. Prior to returning to Columbia to begin the PhD track, he was a visiting researcher at Beijing University.
Kevin BuckelewField: Chinese Religion
Advisor: Bernard Faure & Zhaohua Yang
Email: kdb2121@columbia.edu
Kevin is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Buddhism and religion. His dissertation explores the rise of the Chan Buddhist tradition during the Tang-Song period, analyzing how Chan Buddhists reinterpreted the canonical aesthetics of buddhahood and invented a new set of images and norms according to which Chan masters themselves could be recognized as living buddhas. Other research interests include the role of figurative imagery in mediating the reception of Buddhism in medieval China, with particular attention to the ways this imagery provided a space for Buddhists and Daoists to negotiate the boundary between materiality and metaphor. Before coming to Columbia, he received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.
Joshua BattsField: Japanese History
Advisor: Gregory Pflugfelder
jpb2157@columbia.edu
Joshua Batts received his B.A. from Whittier College (2006) with an emphasis on Japanese history. He began work on a Ph.D. in Japanese history at Columbia in the fall of 2009, teaching English on the outskirts of Tokyo in the interim. In spring 2017, Joshua completed his dissertation, “Circling the Waters: The Keichō Embassy and Japanese-Spanish Relations in the Early Seventeenth Century.” The project examines Japan’s pursuit of trans-Pacific trade with colonial Latin America, Spain’s guarded response, and the unraveling of diplomatic relations between the Tokugawa shogunate and the Habsburg Spanish Empire. The work connects this specific episode to broader questions of the embassy form as a diplomatic tool and the challenges of diplomacy and commerce in the Pacific world.
