Palden Gyal

Field: Tibetan Buddhism and Sino-Tibetan History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: palden.gyal@columbia.edu

Palden Gyal is a doctoral student in Sino-Tibetan history and Tibetan Buddhism. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Duke University (NC) and an M.A. in philosophy of religion and Buddhist studies from Harvard Divinity School (MA). Palden’s research interests lie broadly at the intersections of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. His dissertation project focuses on the practices of governance, the political and institutional history of Tibetan communities in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands from the 18th to the 20th century.

Personal website:  https://pal-den-gyal.com/

Guoying Gong

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: gg2711@columbia.edu

Guoying Gong is a PhD student in pre-modern Chinese literature. She is primarily interested in medieval Chinese poetry, literary thought and criticism, and intellectual history. Before joining Columbia, Guoying received her M.A. in Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Colorado at Boulder, M.A. in Literary Theory and B.A. in Chinese Literature from Peking University.

Cameron Foltz

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: c.foltz@columbia.edu

Cameron Foltz is a PhD candidate specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan history. He is broadly interested in territoriality, migration, ethnicity, and governance in China’s western frontiers. 

His dissertation project draws on Chinese and Tibetan sources to demonstrate that an international wool boom (c. 1880–1930) driven by US carpet production profoundly reshaped the political geography of what would become Qinghai Province (f. 1928) in northwest China. Tibetan pastoralists, who supplied much of the wool, were enriched enough to build community monasteries to territorialize lands that they seized from Mongol communities. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, this lucrative trade soon drew the attention of the Hui Muslim military rulers in Xining who sought to monopolize its profits and incorporate disparate communities into the new province. His second project focuses on decollectivization among pastoralists in Qinghai Province.