Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: bas2260@columbia.edu

Benjamin is a doctoral student in Chinese History. He studies the history of science and technology and the military history of Middle Period East Asia (~ AD 900-1300). Benjamin hopes to use material historical methodologies borrowed from Archaeology and Art History as well as digital humanities tools, like GIS, to better understand the production of technologies like gunpowder and their transmission among the many states that existed in East Asia in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Benjamin received his BA in History from Emory University where he began his research on this period. This past spring he received an MA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University.