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

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

Xun Zheng

Xun Zheng is a PhD student in Japanese film and media. Her research interest focuses on early television and media theories in postwar Japan, which she seeks as a prism to explore the textuality of media experience and the political/ethical implications of broadcasting techniques in the 1960s. Her other interests include Japanese modernist discourse on media and mediation, information studies in Japan, and the history of Chinese television. Prior to joining Columbia for PhD, she received her B.A. from Oberlin College and M.A. from Columbia EALAC.