Janelle Morgan

Sau-yi Fong

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office Hours: M 2-4 PM

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University

Research Interests

Sau-yi Fong is a scholar of late imperial and modern China, as well as a historian of science and technology. Her research focuses on the transimperial histories of industrial technology, maritime knowledge, and military mobilization. She is currently working on a book project that examines late Qing China’s naval rebuilding program to explore the politics of industrial technological transfer from the West to China in the nineteenth century. Tracing the personal, material, and institutional networks connecting the Qing empire to the world’s naval technology, the project uncovers a global regime of arms production that blurred the boundaries between the arms race and the arms trade, secrecy and openness, competition and collaboration.

In addition to her book project, she has written an article investigating the career trajectory of Ding Gongchen (1800-1875), a Muslim maritime merchant and amateur military technologist in mid-nineteenth-century China. This article, published in Late Imperial China 43, no. 2 (December 2022), received honorable mention for the quadrennial Zhu Kezhen Award given by the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Her most recent publication is an article examining the Guomindang’s student military training program from 1928 to 1937, which appears in Modern China 49, no. 4 (July 2023).

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the D. Kim Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She received her PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University in 2022.

Lingran Xie

Field: Modern Tibetan Studies
Advisor: Dr. Gray Tuttle
Email: lx2306@columbia.edu

Lingran Xie is a Ph.D. student in the East Asian Religion program. Her research interest focuses on monasticism in central Tibet (Lhasa and Shigatse), Sino-Tibetan relations during the
modern era, and Buddhist modernity in China. She wrote her M.A. thesis on how Lhasa’s
Drabzhi Lhamo Temple (གྲྭ་བཞི་དགོན་), a Tibetan Buddhist female treasure deity temple,
has encountered Buddhist modernity. In the summer of 2023, through field studies, she examined
the history of Drabzhi Lhamo Temple and its locative area Drabzhi Thang (གྲ་བཞི་ཐང་)
during the reigns of the Yongzheng Emperor and the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty,
explored the possible explanation of Grabzhi Lhamo’s origin and identity, and analyzed factors
contributing to Drabzhi Lhamo’s recent rise in popularity.

She received her B.A. in Religious Studies and Asian Studies from DePauw University
and her M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC) from Columbia University. At
DePauw, her research broadly included analysis of pre-modern and modern Chinese literatures,
relations between the Chinese government and religions in the contemporary era, and the
political significance of religious imageries in modern Tibetan history. Before joining the M.A.
program at EALAC, she worked for two years as a research assistant at Yak Museum of Tibet in
Lhasa, where she conducted field research on the city’s monasteries.

Andrew Kahn

Field: Japanese Media and Literature
Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: ak3398@columbia.edu

Andrew Kahn is a PhD student in Japanese film and media. His current research seeks to understand how concepts of “indigeneity” functioned to define nation and self in discourses of the 1960s and 1970s. He takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining film and works of literature alongside their critical reception, and is fascinated by the remediation in modernity of the premodern past. He is pursuing graduate certificates from the Center for Comparative Media and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Andrew received an M.A. in EALAC from Columbia, where his thesis project situated Imamura Shōhei’s filmmaking practice in the 1960s within contemporary discussions about autochthony (dochaku). Before that, he received a B.A. in Literature from Yale. In between, he worked as a journalist, programming web interactives and writing on culture, and performed sketch comedy in New York City. He collects Edo-period Japanese porcelain. For more information, please visit andrewmkahn.com