Cameron Foltz

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: c.foltz@columbia.edu

Cameron Foltz is a PhD candidate specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan history. He is broadly interested in territoriality, migration, ethnicity, and governance in China’s western frontiers. 

His dissertation project draws on Chinese and Tibetan sources to demonstrate that an international wool boom (c. 1880–1930) driven by US carpet production profoundly reshaped the political geography of what would become Qinghai Province (f. 1928) in northwest China. Tibetan pastoralists, who supplied much of the wool, were enriched enough to build community monasteries to territorialize lands that they seized from Mongol communities. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, this lucrative trade soon drew the attention of the Hui Muslim military rulers in Xining who sought to monopolize its profits and incorporate disparate communities into the new province. His second project focuses on decollectivization among pastoralists in Qinghai Province.

Albert E. Errickson

Field: Vietnamese Studies
Advisor: John Phan
Email: aee2126@columbia.edu

Yi Deng

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: yd2366@columbia.edu

Yi is a PhD student in early modern Japanese literature. Some of her interests include historical narratives, classical poetry, Noh plays, ghost stories, revenge tales, and legends of demon-slaying. Her primary focus is late Edo yomihon, where many of these elements converge. Beyond that, she is also interested in the publishing industry, contemporary media, and literary translation.

Yi received her BA in Neurobiology & Behavior from Cornell University (2011), MI in Library and Information Science from Rutgers University (2018), and MA in Japanese Literature from Columbia University (2022).