Dan Nguyen

Field: Early-Modern Vietnamese History
Advisor: John Phan
Email: dtn2123@columbia.edu

Dan Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate on the History-East Asia track. His work focuses on the post-Ming Chinese diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnamese states of Tonkin and Cochinchina. His dissertation focuses on the formation and collapse of indigenous Cochinchinese elite clans during the pre-imperial Nguyen period (c.1558-1786), and their subsequent replacement with the hybrid Sino-Vietnamese elite normative of the Nguyen dynasty proper (1802-1945). His interests include middle period and late imperial Confucianism across East Asia, the intellectual history of civilization (hua) and barbarism (yi) within the Confucian tradition, Literary Sinitic prose and poetry in Vietnam, and the influence of Chinese peoples and institutions on state and identity formation in early modern Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Dan received a B.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Music from the University of Houston.

Deanna T. Nardy

Field: Modern Japanese Literature
Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: dtn2109@columbia.edu

Deanna T. Nardy is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Japanese literature and visual media. Before returning to Columbia, she received her MA in Contemporary Culture Studies from Kyoto University (2018), and her BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University (2015).  Her research interests include black studies and decolonial theories and their circulation in Japan, black literature in translation, postwar rental comics, and the processes by which art constitutes revolutionary praxis and fosters radical subjectivity.

Peter Moody

Field: Korean History
Advisors: Gregory Pflugfelder and Jungwon Kim
Email: pgm2116@columbia.edu

Peter is a PhD student in East Asian History specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Korea and Japan. He is interested in looking at how the discourse of tradition vs. modern evolved during the colonial and post-war periods, particularly when state actors used notions of civilization and advancement to win support for political projects that were sometimes at the expense of the subaltern. Before coming to Columbia, he obtained his Master’s in East Asian Studies from the University of Virginia where he wrote his thesis on mass mobilization campaigns in North Korea. His recent research interests include microhistories of North Korean coastal cities and the intersection of North Korean ideology and cultural production, particularly when it comes to the popular music soundscape.