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

Field: Japanese Cinema and Literature
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).

Francesca Zhao

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

Francesca is a PhD student in pre-modern Chinese literature. She is particularly interested in investigating the conception of space in the Qing novels. Francesca has a BSocSci (Hons) in Geography with a minor in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and an MA in History from the National University of Singapore.