current-phd-students

Danny M.C. Ching

Danny M.C. Ching

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History, Sino-Tibetan Buddhist Art
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: mc5468@columbia.edu

Danny M.C. Ching is a Ph.D. student in the East Asia-History program. He received his MSc. in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford, M.A. in Asian Studies from the Universiteit Leiden, and B.A. in Translation from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Danny’s primary research interest lies in the visual representation of the Gesar epic. Specifically, he focuses on how the open-ended, non-essentialist, and liminal pan-Central Asian oral tradition has been translated into an art genre. He aims to unravel how the development of Gesar art reflects political and sociocultural changes in Tibet, China, and Inner Asia. This exploration is particularly relevant as the oral epic navigates between forbidden and canonical status due to shifting ideologies of different authorities. His other research interests include Sino-Tibetan Buddhist art at the Ming and Qing imperial courts, as well as Buddhist art history in general.

Before starting his doctoral studies at Columbia, Danny worked as an Assistant Curator at the Hong Kong Palace Museum. He made curatorial contributions to various exhibitions, including “Entering the Forbidden City: Architecture, Collection, and Heritage”, “Clay to Treasure: Ceramics from the Palace Museum Collection”, and “Private to Public: The History of Chinese Art Collecting in Hong Kong”. Additionally, he curated the “Buddhist Art Across Borders” exhibition at Barakat Gallery Hong Kong.

Since 2016, Danny has partnered with a Hong Kong-based startup to organize cultural tours to Tibet, specifically catering to university students and young professionals. Over the years, he personally led multiple tours to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, curated reading materials on Tibetan history, and delivered thematic lectures both on-site and during transit.

Recent Publications:

  • (2022) ‘The Yongzheng Emperor: A Control Freak?’, ‘The Qianlong Emperor: Imperial Vandalism?’, ‘Tang Ying: Master of Glaze’, ‘Master Craftsmen from the Tibetan Plateau’, ‘Winter Olympics: The Qing Court Version’, ‘A Birthday Gift Befitting an Empress Dowager’, in Tales of the Forbidden City: 1644–1911, Hong Kong: The Commercial Press (Hong Kong), p. 62–63, 82–83, 118–119, 120–121, 218–219, 238–239.
  • (2022) (co-author) ‘Private to Public: History of Chinese Art Collecting in Hong Kong’, Arts of Asia, Summer 2022, p.70–80.

(2019) (ed.) Buddhist Art from the Barakat Collection. Seoul: Barakat Gallery.

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Peter Chen

Peter Chen

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia Liu
Email: pc2936@columbia.edu

Peter Yuanxi Chen’s dissertation, tentatively entitled “Otherwise than Empire: Anarchist Philology in Late Qing China,” examines the political and ethical space between philosophy and philology and the possibility of literature therein. Before coming to Columbia, he received his BA in Religious Studies from Pomona College and his MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in Philosophy of Religions. He spent a year after college in Hangzhou at the China Academy of Art on a Fulbright, conducting a research project on aesthetics and ethics in the work of the twentieth-century artist Feng Zikai.

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Xuexin Cai

Xuexin Cai

Field: Chinese and Environmental History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Year of Enrollment: 2020
Email: xc2546@columbia.edu

Xuexin Cai is a PhD candidate in the History-East Asia Program. He works at the intersection of environmental humanities, borderlands studies, and the history of science and technology. While his current research focuses on Yunnan, in Southwest China, he is also interested in the broader Sino-Southeast Asian and Sino-Tibetan borderlands.

His dissertation, titled “Between Wasteland and Wilderness: Rubber, Nature, and the Making of Tropical China, 1945-2000,” explores the socio-environmental history of Xishuangbanna (Sipsongpanna), which sits at the intersection of China, Laos, and Burma, and is one of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and critical use of scientific studies and digital geospatial mapping, his dissertation traces two intertwined historical processes in the half century following the end of WWII: the biophysical, socioeconomic, and discursive transformation of southern Yunnan (particularly Xishuangbanna) from a remote borderland into the center of China’s tropical sciences and agriculture, and China’s transformation into a state with serious commitment to environmentally sustainable development. Focusing on China’s coterminous establishment of rubber farms and nature reserves, this project explores questions that are key to understanding the environmental changes and the lived experience of millions of people in southern Yunnan and beyond, from the Maoist to the Reform periods.

Experiences before coming to Columbia have shaped Xuexin’s current research interests. During his undergraduate years at New York University Abu Dhabi, he studied the history of tea trade between communities in Southwest China and those on the Tibetan Plateau. Upon graduation, he went to Yunnan and spent three years there, working first in the public humanities and then at a village primary school not far from the China-Burma border. The people and places that he became familiar with during those years continue to be an important source of inspiration for his current research.

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