current-phd-students

Crismon Lewis

Crismon Lewis

Field: Chinese History

Advisor: Feng Li

Email: crismon.lewis@columbia.edu

Crismon Lewis is a doctoral student of pre-modern Chinese history primarily interested in the literary qualities of ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions and their implications for the social history of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE). Prior to joining the EALAC department at Columbia, Crismon received an M.A. from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Colorado Boulder and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

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Hana Lethen

Hana Lethen

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: hana.lethen@columbia.edu

Hana works on premodern Japanese performance, with a focus on medieval nō theater. She received her A.B. in comparative literature from Princeton in 2017. Hana’s research investigates the theatrical processes by which madness (monogurui) serves as a nexus for gendered notions of spirit possession, emotional trauma, dance, and obsession operative in premodern Japan. By articulating how madness and gender constitute each other in nō plays, Hana seeks to utilize madness as a means for engaging in particular with the “feminine” and the nonhuman in nō, while yielding insights to performative representations of gender more broadly. A firm believer in scholarship informed by praxis, Hana has been taking nō dance and chant lessons for several years.

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Mengheng Lee

Mengheng Lee

Field: Pre-Modern Korean History, Early  Modern Sino-Korean Relation
Advisor: Jungwon Kim & Robert Hymes
Email: ml4052@columbia.edu

Mengheng is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Korean history. His research interests include social, legal, and political history of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) and contemporary Korean historiography. He also specializes in early modern Sino-Korean relations (Ming-Qing-Chosŏn relations). In his M.A. thesis, Mengheng discussed border-crossing issues between Chosŏn and Manchu in the early 17th century, dealing with the repatriation of ukanju and Manchu-Chosŏn relations. Now he is working on examining the formation of the borderland between Qing and Chosŏn, and the social status system of Chosŏn. Before joining Columbia, he received both his B.A. (2011) and M.A. (2015) in Department of History at National Taiwan University and spent one year at Korea University, Korea (2013-2014) for his personal research.

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