Nicole Roldan

Melissa Li

Melissa Li

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: gl2595@columbia.edu

Melissa Li is a Ph.D. student in premodern Japanese literature. During her graduate studies, she intends to untangle the theatrical experience of late Edo kabuki through literary analysis, theatre criticism and cultural studies. She is interested in the duality of kabuki theatre, both as a form of entertainment to be performed and consumed, and an agency to shape commoners’ reading preferences, dramatize circulating texts, and further construct a new communal identity of Edo that overlaid the city’s previously shared historical memories centered on samurai and household. Her current project engages with the continuities and transformations in the dramaturgy of 19 th -century Edo kabuki, through a comparative study of representative sewamono (contemporary-themed) plays by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, Segawa Jokō III, and Kawatake Mokuami. Melissa received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 2015.

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Faculty Award


Professor Seong Uk Kim receives the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant Award

Professor Seong Uk Kim receives the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant Award

Seong Uk Kim has received the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant Award, awarding him $15,000 towards his field research in Korea. The manuscript, “Evolving Tradition: revisiting the Buddhist-Confucian relationship in East Asia” (tentative), investigates the invention and reinvention of Korean Buddhism from the 17th to the 19th century, rethinking standard narratives of the Buddhist decline and decay during the period, and, at the same time, explores the meaning of such development within the broader East Asian context in terms of the Buddhist-Confucian relationship.

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Faculty Award


Professor Theodore Hughes receives the 2019-20 Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant

Professor Theodore Hughes receives the 2019-20 Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant

Theodore Hughes has received the 2019-20 Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant for his book project, “The Continuous War: Cultures of Division in Korea.”

Here is a brief description of the book:

The Continuous War: Cultures of Division in Korea underscores both the specificity of the Korean War and its effects and the broader circuits of texts, images, and ideas that moved through the Asia-Pacific in the 1950s. Examining literary and filmic representations of the Korean War in South Korea, North Korea, and the US, The Continuous War opens up the ways in which the Korean War—at once a civil war and an international conflict—played a central role in the formation of global cold war culture.

For information on the Humanities War & Peace Initiative, please see here: https://fas.columbia.edu/hwpi.