current-phd-students

Sally Greenland

Sally Greenland

Field: Mongolian and Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes

Sally Greenland studies the complexities of the Mongol Empire and its successor states. Her academic interests include the history of military engagement and militarization, the political cultures of Inner Asia, and nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe. Her current focus on elite Mongol women evolved from her master’s dissertation, which scrutinized the contributions of female leaders in the Mongol Empire during the early imperial and imperial periods.

Sally holds an M.A. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics (with distinction) in international history. She also earned a Bachelor of Business from QUT in Brisbane, Australia. Prior to joining Columbia, she worked in both the finance and entertainment sectors. Sally prefers to spend winters in the basement of Starr Library and summers riding across the Steppe.

by

Mackenzie A. Fox

Mackenzie A. Fox

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: maf2292@columbia.edu

Mackenzie is a Ph.D. student studying the social and cultural history of middle-period China. His research interests currently center on the evolving visions of the social world present in a variety of texts produced and circulated primarily at the local level. Before coming to Columbia, he received a B.A. in History and East Asian Languages and Cultures from Rutgers University, New Brunswick and spent a year studying Chinese at ICLP in Taiwan.

by

Cameron Foltz

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.

by