Xiaoke Yang

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: xy2504@columbia.edu

Xiaoke Yang is a Ph.D. student in medieval Japanese Religion and Material Culture. Her research interests center on the materiality of religious objects that facilitate relations between humans, objects, and deities. She focuses on how religious objects generate and empower living networks that translate tangible materials into intangible religious and socio-political benefits. She is also interested in how religious objects described in literary works like folktales, myths, and performative texts serve similar functions as actual offerings in cultic belief construction.

Xiaoke received her BA in East Asian Studies from New York University (2020), and MA in Japanese Religion from Columbia University (2023).

Hekang Yang

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Madeleine Zelin
Email: hy2614@columbia.edu

Hekang is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he works with Madeleine Zelin. His research focuses on modern Chinese history in global and imperial contexts, with particular attention to political economy, frontier governance, imperial statecraft, bureaucratic institutions, state finance, and transnational trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also undertaken extensive language and area-studies training in Russian and Soviet history at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, NYU, Princeton, and Middlebury.

His dissertation project, Reinventing Frontier Commerce: China, Russia, and the World Economy, 1805–1911, examines how a historically rooted overland trade regime in Inner Asia—epitomized by the Kyakhta system linking the Qing and Russian empires—adapted to the emergence of an industrial, extraction-driven world economy in the nineteenth century. Although imperial Russia was Qing China’s second-largest trading partner in the eighteenth century, its relative importance was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by British India, the United States, and other maritime powers. Challenging the resulting historiographical marginalization of Qing–Russian commerce, the dissertation analyzes how transformations in frontier exchange—including the liberalization of cross-border trade, transnational migration, and the expansion of business ventures and fiscal extraction into imperial interiors—reshaped the political economy and practices of economic statecraft in Qing China and, to a lesser extent, imperial Russia. More broadly, the project explores how the interaction between trade and politics reconfigured sovereignty, jurisdiction, and imperial authority prior to the rise of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism.

Chuan Xu

Field: Modern Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email: cx2193@columbia.edu

Chuan Xu is a doctoral student of modern China interested in governmentality studies, media archaeology, critical theory, and history of science and technology.

His previous project, titled From Sonic Models to Sonic Hooligans, examines the role of magnetic tape in the rise and fall of Maoist China’s sound regime. His current project studies the shifting epistemic practices in the early post-Mao period through the lens of paranormal research, a decade-long mass movement in which everyone from prominent scientists to illiterate peasants conducted experiments and observations to corroborate and contest the existence of human superpower. Through this project, he seeks to illustrate how the emergence of post-Mao China was as much an epistemic event as an economic, political, and cultural event. In another project, tentatively titled Math for the Masses, Chuan studies the development and application of operations method (tongchoufa) and optimization method (youxuanfa) in the context of Maoist China. He has also written on the intellectual impact of cybernetics in United States and China, particularly with regard to the development of Graphical User Interface and the rise of economic cybernetics.

Before coming to Columbia, Chuan received his B.A. and M.A. in History at Stanford University, where he also developed an interest in computer programming. In his spare time, he enjoys going to remote corners of the globe with broad horizons and starry skies.