Janelle Morgan

Lu Kou

Lu Kou

Director Of Undergraduate Studies, Assistant Professor

Office: 412 Kent Hall
Office Hours: TBD
Phone:
Email: lk2950@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Peking University (2010)
MA: Harvard University (2012)
PhD: Harvard University (2018)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3935 The Fantastic in Pre-Modern China
EAAS GU4031 History of Chinese Literature

Research Interests

As a medievalist and a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, Lu Kou’s research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, poetry and poetics, historiography, and comparative studies of China’s Middle Period and medieval Europe. He is currently at work on two book projects: War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, which examines the “discursive battles” fought among rival states in China’s early medieval period and investigates how rhetoric constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity; and (tentatively titled) Locked Seal, Heart of Poetry: Bureaucracy and the Representation of Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry, 400-900 CE, which studies the dialectic between poetry and bureaucratic systems, between the lyrical and quotidian renderings of “work” in medieval poetry. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bard College (2019-2022) and Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College (2018-2019).

Selected Publications

“The Poetics and Politics of Space: Writing Imperial Visits of Private Estates in Early Tang Court Poetry.” The Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. 2023. Special issue on “court culture.”

“Audible Empire: Musical Orthodoxy and Spectacle in the Sui Dynasty.” Early Medieval China, vol. 28 (2022): pp. 73-96.

“Epistolary Exchange and Psychological Warfare: Tuoba Tao’s 拓跋燾 (408–452, r. 423–452) Letters to his Southern Audience.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 7.1 (2020): pp. 34-59.

[Chinese version:] “Shuxin zhong de junwang xingxiang yu xinli zhan: Tuoba Tao (408–452, r. 423–452) de guoshu he ta de nanfang duzhe” 書信中的君王形象與心理戰：拓跋燾（408–452）的國書和他的南方讀者. Lingnan xuebao 嶺南學報, 13 (2020): pp. 51-72.

Theodore Hughes

Theodore Hughes

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities

Office: 618 Kent Hall
Office Hours: WR 3:00 pm-4:00pm
Phone: (212) 854-8545
Email: th2150@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of California, San Diego (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’97)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’02)

Classes Taught

EAAS 3215 Korean Literature and Film
EAAS 3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS 4124 South Korean Film as History
EAAS 4160 Cultures in Colonial Korea

Research Interests

Visual culture, film, literature, cultural studies, history

Theodore Hughes received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His
research interests include visual culture, film, literature, and history. He works across
disciplines, with a particular interest in intermediality—the relations between visual and
verbal forms of cultural production. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War
South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was named
a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the
Association for Asian Studies for the best book in Korean studies in the year of its
publication. Co-edited works include Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film,
and Art (special issue of Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); and Rat Fire: Korean Stories
from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan
Literary Translation Prize. He is the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee
Ho-Chul (EastBridge, 2004; reissued under EastBridge imprint at Camphor Press, 2017).
His next book, Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War, is
forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a project that
approaches the South Korean mystery novel as a form of historiography.

Selected Publications

Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (co-editor, Cornell, 2013)
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012)

Allison Bernard

Allison Bernard

MA Program Director and Lecturer in Discipline

Office: 414 Kent Hall
Office Hours: R 3:00-5:00 pm
Phone:
Email: aeb2197@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University
MA: Columbia University
BA: Middlebury College

Classes Taught

EAAS GU4031: Introduction to the History of Chinese Literature: Vernacular Fiction and Drama
AHUM UN1400: Colloquium on Major Texts
EAAS UN3119: Theater/Drama Traditions of China and Japan
EAAS UN3114: Chinese Theater and Drama

Research Interests

Allison Bernard is a scholar of Chinese literature and culture whose research focuses on Ming-Qing drama, print and theatrical cultures, and the intersections of literature and history. She is working on a book manuscript that examines the uses of metatheatre in and around Kong Shangren’s historical drama, Taohua shan (The Peach Blossom Fan). This project reveals the significance of theatrical media and performance practices for framing the political and historical valences of 17th century dramas and demonstrates how The Peach Blossom Fan’s uses of metatheatre serve as an innovative form of historiography (including in its treatment of Ruan Dacheng: a blacklisted mid-17th century politician and playwright, who appears on stage in The Peach Blossom Fan as a dramatic character).

In addition to her work on theater and performance, Dr. Bernard is interested in questions about how media shapes the reading and writing of early modern Chinese literature. Other in-progress projects include articles on early-mid Qing autobiographical playwrights Liao Yan and Xu Xi, concepts of visuality and portraiture in Kong Shangren’s “portrait-poetry,” and the emperor’s role type in early modern Chinese dramas.

Before joining EALAC full-time, she held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies, Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Columbia.

Selected Publications

“‘Making History’: Metatheatre in The Peach Blossom Fan.” Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature 40, no. 2 (Dec 2021): 99-127.