current-phd-students

Daniel Penner

Daniel Penner

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Tomi Suzuki
Email: dp2964@columbia.edu

Daniel is a PhD candidate in Japanese literature and cultural history. His dissertation, “Languages of Critical Enlightenment: Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Writing in Meiji Japan,” examines emergent cultures of knowledge production, organization and circulation in the Meiji period (1868-1912). In particular, his work focuses on how the demands of translation brought issues of language, orthography, and rhetoric to the forefront in the critical engagement with Euro-American conceptions of nature and society. Before joining Columbia’s EALAC department, Daniel received a BA in Mathematics at Princeton in 2014, and an MA in Statistics at Stanford in 2016. He is also an avid rock musician and language learner.

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Dan Nguyen

Dan Nguyen

Field: Early-Modern Vietnamese History
Advisor: John Phan
Email: dtn2123@columbia.edu

Dan Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate on the History-East Asia track. His work focuses on the post-Ming Chinese diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnamese states of Tonkin and Cochinchina. His dissertation focuses on the formation and collapse of indigenous Cochinchinese elite clans during the pre-imperial Nguyen period (c.1558-1786), and their subsequent replacement with the hybrid Sino-Vietnamese elite normative of the Nguyen dynasty proper (1802-1945). His interests include middle period and late imperial Confucianism across East Asia, the intellectual history of civilization (hua) and barbarism (yi) within the Confucian tradition, Literary Sinitic prose and poetry in Vietnam, and the influence of Chinese peoples and institutions on state and identity formation in early modern Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining the EALAC department, Dan received a B.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Music from the University of Houston.

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Maho Miyazaki

Maho Miyazaki

Field: Japanese Literature
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
Email: mm4909@columbia.edu

Maho Miyazaki is a PhD candidate in premodern Japanese literature. Before joining Columbia she received her BA (2012) and MA (2014) in English literature from Kyoto University. Her research project focuses on theories on cross-dressing in noh plays; how men in the 14th to 15th centuries imagined and recreated female body, and how gender and age of actors have affected the theorization of female impersonation. Her research also includes comparisons with two other transvestite theatrical genres, kabuki and English Renaissance theatre, and the changes and evolvement in female impersonation brought about by the participation of female professional noh performers since the 20th century.

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