current-phd-students

Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown 李素文

Joanna SW Lee-Brown 李素文

Field: Modern Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia H. Liu
Joanna is a PhD student of modern Chinese Literature associated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her proposed dissertation project examines literary exchanges between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Arab World to explore the shifting relationship among global Islam, socialism, and Third World internationalism from the 1940s to the present. Her broader research interests include Marxist thought and problems of translation, difference, and alterity. Joanna received a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and worked at Yale-NUS College in Singapore prior to beginning her PhD at Columbia University.

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Hetty Ye-Jae Lee

Hetty Ye-Jae Lee

Field: Korean Cultural History
Advisor: Theodore Hughes
Email: yl2693@columbia.edu

Hetty is a PhD student in EALAC focusing on modern Korean cultural history. Her research interests include Korean socialist feminist literature and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies. Under this umbrella, she is interested in analyzing women’s writing, censorship, and the intersections between colonialism, socialism, and the history of science and technology in 20th century Korea.

Hetty received her BA in comparative literature from Princeton University in 2017 with a focus on German and Ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She received her MA in modern Korean literature and cultural studies from Columbia University in 2023.

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Ekaterina Komova

Ekaterina Komova

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: ek2853@columbia.edu

Ekaterina is a PhD student in premodern Japanese literature. Prior to coming to Columbia, she received her BA in Asian Language and Culture (Hons., 2012) followed by her MA in Asian Studies (2014) from the University of British Columbia. Her primary research areas include the history and development of linguistic thought as well as the interrelation between linguistic processes such as grammatical and semantic broadening and their effect on the evolution and aesthetization of certain poetic and literary concepts. She is also interested in the tradition of poetic commentaries and reception, in addition to the stylistics and reading of kuzushiji (cursive) texts. Outside of her field of specialty, Ekaterina is actively involved in the research of phonetics of Czech and Russian.

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