Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Field: Tibetan and Chinese Visual Culture
Advisor: Gray Tuttle and Ying Qian
Email: yl3452@columbia.edu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu is a PhD student on the History-East Asia track, focusing on Tibetan and Chinese visual culture. Her research interest covers Tibetan cultural productions including art (both traditional and contemporary), photography and film. Victoria has written on topics such as the representation of Tibetan people in portrait photography, the use of traditional religious vocabulary in contemporary art and the indexicality of photographic technology in Tibetan cinema.

Her current project focuses on Tibetan portraits under the influence of photographic technology. With training in comparative media, she approaches the act of portrait making, image forming and photo taking as visual, cultural and social practices and attempts to place them in a context that is closely correlated with the evolution of Chinese visual culture and social environment.

Before joining the doctoral program, Victoria received her BA in Art History from Barnard College and MA in Tibetan Studies from EALAC at Columbia University.

Yan Liu (刘衍)

Field: Modern Chinese literature and culture
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: yan.l@columbia.edu

Yan Liu (刘衍) is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and culture. His research probes the entanglements between art, literature, and politics, with a focus on the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century, the cultural Cold War in the Sinophone world, and the political history of China’s avant-garde movements.

Xinzhi Lin

Field: Chinese History

Advisors: Robert Hymes and Zhaohua Yang

Email: xl3020@columbia.edu

Xinzhi is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Chinese history, he studies the political, intellectual, and religious history of the Song dynasty. His primary research focuses on the development of the Song emperorship system, the evolving roles of emperors and those high officials, the changing nature of the imperial-subjects relationships, also how Song emperors were able to position themselves above religious hierarchies through political maneuvers on the one hand and ideological reframing of religion on the other hand. 

Xinzhi was born in the ancient capital city of the Song- Kaifeng, in Henan Province of China, and grew up in Flushing, New York. Xinzhi received his BA in History and International Relations from Syracuse University in 2020 and his MA in EALAC from Columbia in 2022.