Xinyi Zhao (趙心怡)

Xinyi Zhao is a doctoral candidate in East Asian cinema and media. An interdisciplinary researcher by training, she aims to reappraise the history of East Asian cinema through underexplored historiographies: transnational, media archaeological, and feminist. Her dissertation, “Cinema as a Quest for Modernity: Film Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)lives of Manchukuo,” engages with the discursive and social formations of cinema in the Japanese “puppet state” within a larger regional and global media environment. This project has been supported by Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and Donald Keene Research Grant in Japanese Studies. Her additional research areas include the intersection of affect theory and Japanese New Wave cinema and the translation of Japanese film theory in Republican China.

Xinyi co-translated with Jianqing Chen Thomas Elsaesser’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2009) into Chinese (under contract with Peking University Press). Her recent work on Japan’s first female director, Sakane Tazuko, appears in The Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism (forthcoming).

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).

Fran Zhao 赵洁敏

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

Francesca is a PhD student majoring in premodern Chinese literature. For her dissertation, Francesca is working on the politics of the Ming (1368–1644) state theatre through the dual lenses of textualization and stage performance. Her research interests extend to the visual and material culture of East Asian religions.

Francesca has worked as a teaching assistant for courses on Chinese history, Buddhism, strategic visual communication, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). She was a Lead Teaching Fellow and Teaching Observation Fellow with the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. 

Francesca received her BSocSci (Hons) in Geography with a minor in GIS, and MA (Research) in History from the National University of Singapore. 

Yifan Zhang

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

Yifan is a Ph.D. student in Chinese literature, with a focus on the Ming and Qing dynasties (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, and has a keen interest in examining how they speak to the issues that derive from and respond to urban history, local history, elite society, print culture, and material culture. His current dissertation project explores language practice and cultural innovation in the Wu dialect area that centers on Suzhou, the economic and cultural pivot in early modern China.