Dongxin Zou

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email: dz2245@columbia.edu

 

 

Dongxin Zou is a doctoral student in modern Chinese history, with interests in medicine and science, Cold War politics, and China’s relations with the Middle Eastern and North African countries in the post-colonial world. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Arabic Language & Culture from Beijing Foreign Studies University where upon graduation she worked as a lecturer in Arabic for three years. Prior to entering Columbia, she earned M.A. in History from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Xinyi Zhao

Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: xz2468@columbia.edu

 

 

 

An interdisciplinary scholar by training, Xinyi Zhao aims to reappraise the history of East Asian cinema through unexplored historiographies: transnational, media archaeological, and feminist. Her M.A. thesis excavates the emergence of film culture and spectatorship in colonial Manchuria with respect to the cross-cultural articulation of colonial modernity. Currently she is investigating the shifting postwar Japanese media ecology to reflect on the cinema’s historical interactions and theoretical overlaps with other media practices across East Asia. She is also interested in women’s participation in early film industry worldwide (as a research fellow of the Women Film Pioneers Project), anime, transnational melodrama, and sound studies.

Prior to relocating to EALAC, Xinyi received her M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University (2017), M.A. in Chinese Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2014), and Joint B.A. in Economics and Japanese from Shanghai International Studies University (2012).

Yifan Zhang

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Email: yz2681@columbia.edu

 

 

Yifan is a Ph.D. student in premodern Chinese literature, with a focus on the Ming-Qing period (1368-1912). He received his B.A.(2014) from Peking University and M.A.(2016) from Columbia University. He works primarily on Ming-Qing short and long narratives (fiction in particular), departing from which he is also interested in the issues that derive from and respond to literary history, elite culture, local history, intellectual history, and material culture. His M.A. thesis examined how men of letters mobilized the genre of zhiguai (anomaly writing) as cultural imagination of otherness, and thus drew resources from local lure, ruins, gossips, and craze to reconstruct both the physical and figural landscapes in mid-Ming (1450-1550) Suzhou. Currently he is working further to illuminate the casting and recasting of local knowledge put to test the normative in a multifaceted lived space, and ponder how the discourses of norms and anomalies shed new light on the mid-Ming literary and cultural underpinnings that ushered in the late-Ming (1550-1644).