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Paul Kreitman

Paul Kreitman

Associate Professor of Japanese History

Office: Kent 613
Office Hours: On leave 2021-2022 academic year
Phone: (212) 854-0374
Email: pk2528@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of Oxford (’06)
PhD: Princeton University (’15)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1361 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Japan
HSEA GU4822 Troubled Islands of the Indo-Pacific
HSEA GR8839 Graduate Colloquium in Modern Japanese History

Research Interests

Japanese history, environmental history, global history, science and technology studies

Paul Kreitman’s research interests include environmental history, global history, commodity history, and histories of science and technology. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University in 2015, with a doctoral dissertation entitled “Feathers, Fertilizer and States of Nature: Uses of Albatrosses in the U.S.-Japan Borderlands”. He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the relationship between resource extraction, nature conservation and state formation in the North Pacific. His second project examines the political ecology of excrement in the Greater Tokyo area, focusing on the slow obsolescence of night soil fertilizer over the course of the twentieth century.

Paul received his BA from the University of Oxford in 2006, after which he worked as a carbon offset consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in Tokyo. He joins Columbia after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, jointly affiliated with SOAS.

Dorothy Ko

Dorothy Ko

Professor of Chinese History

Office: Milstein 803
Office Hours: T 2-4 PM

Phone: (212) 854-9624
Email: dk2031@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Stanford University
MA: Stanford University
PhD: Stanford University

Classes Taught

HIST BC2861 Chinese Cultural History
HIST BC2865 Gender and Power in China
HIST BC3514 Historical Approaches to Feminist Questions
HIST BC3864 Feast and Famine: Food and Environment in Chinese History

Research Interests

History of China, Gender, History of science, technology and medicine

Professor Ko’s research interest is the everyday lives of women in China –along with the domestic objects they made by hand–as a significant part of country’s cultural, economic and political development. She works at the intersections of anthropology, history, and women’s studies. Ko’s 2005 book, Cinderella Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association. Recently, she has been turning her attention to the skills of women’s artisans such as embroiderers, stone carvers, and ceramic artists. She is also co-editor of Women and Confucian Cultures in Pre-modern China, Korea, and Japan. Ko’s courses include Chinese cultural history, body histories, women and culture in 17th century China, and Confucian cultures.

Ko earned undergraduate and advanced degrees at Stanford University, including the doctorate. Her honors include lifetime memberships at the Academia Sinica and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 she served as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress. She has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (2000-2001), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000-2001), the American Council of Learned Societies (2012-13), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, among others. Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2001, Professor Ko taught at Rutgers University.

Selected Publications

The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China (Washington, 2017)

Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (University of California, 2005)

Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-century China (Stanford, 1994)

Seong Uk Kim

Seong Uk Kim

Il Hwan and Soonja Cho Associate Professor of Korean Culture and Religion

Office: 616 Kent Hall
Office Hours: M/W 2:30-3:30 PM
Email: sk4236@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’13)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1363 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Korea
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EARL GU4320 Buddhism and Korean Culture

Research Interests

Korean Buddhism and Religions, East Asian Buddhism and Religions

Seong Uk Kim’s research interest lies in the intersections between Buddhism and other religions in pre-modern Korea. His first book, Monks and Literati, examines the relationships between Buddhist monastics and Confucian elites with diverse attitudes toward Buddhism in the late Chosŏn period from the 17th to 19th centuries. His current research explores the development of self-identifying Sŏn Buddhist communities of the same period to reconstruct the social, cultural, and religious history of Korean Sŏn tradition. Before coming to Columbia, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis (2013-2014) and Harvard University (2014-2015), teaching “Buddhist Traditions,” “Introduction to Korean Religions,” and “Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion

Selected Publications

“The Intersections between Buddhism and Folk Religions in the Late Chosŏn: The Case Study of the Kitchen-God Cult,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 30.1(2020).

“Kwanŭm (Avalokiteśvara) Divination: Buddhist Reconciliation with Confucianism in the Late Chosŏn,” Religions 11 (2020)

“Korean Confucianization of Zen: Ch’oŭi Ŭisun’s (1786–1866) Affirmation of a Confucian Literati Approach to Buddhism in Late Chosŏn,” Acta Koreana (2016)

“The Zen Theory of Language: Linji Yixuan’s Teaching of ‘Three Statements, Three Mysteries, and Three Essentials,’” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (2015)