Siwei Wang

Field: Modern Chinese Literature
Advisor: Lydia H. Liu
Email: sw2914@columbia.edu

Siwei is interested in studying Chinese socialist literature within the context of cooperative cultural production among Third World intellectuals following the Bandung Conference. Her interest also includes but is not limited to Chinese diaspora in Latin America and Chinese independent documentaries. Her latest research examines translation between Chinese and Brazilian literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Currently, she is working on late Qing intellectuals’ travel writing of Latin America. She received her B.A. from Hebei University (2010) and M.A. from Peking University (2014). She joined EALAC’s M.A. program in 2014 and has continued to study in the PhD program since 2017.

Shih-han Wang

Field: Chinese History and Archaeology
Advisor: Li Feng
Email: sw3119@columbia.edu

Shih-han is a PhD student in the history of early China. Her research interest lies in the multifaceted relationship between the Central Plains and its frontier regions and cultural interactions reflected on material culture. In particular, she is interested in how a “peripheral” society reacts to a foreign culture’s arrival. Her dissertation explores the lower Yangtze, one of the Central Plains’ peripheries, by incorporating archaeological, historical, and paleographical sources. This work aims to understand the social development, the regional material culture, and the historical memory from the perspective of local society and to challenge the traditional Sinicization model.

Shih-han received both her B. A. (2011) and M.A. (2016) from National Taiwan University.

 

 

Selina Wang 王和

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: David Lurie and Haruo Shirane
Email: hw2687@columbia.edu

Selina is a PhD student in premodern Japanese literature. She focuses on the literary construction and development of humor in premodern East Asia, specifically how people invent and record humor through Literary Sinitic, kana systems, or a mixture of both. She treats humor as a creative crossover point between high and low culture, power hierarchies, and boundaries between wit and emotions. She is also interested in literary theory and the epistemological relationship between writing system and language in East Asia and is pursuing a graduate certificate in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Selina received a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society and Philosophy from Columbia University (2022), where she completed a senior thesis focusing on how humor transcended temporal and sociopolitical realities in Shishuo xinyu and Makura no sōshi.