current-phd-students

Alexander Sogo

Alexander Sogo

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: acs2299@columbia.edu

Alex is a PhD student in premodern Japanese religion. His studies focus on demonic spirits, possession, exorcism in Heian Japan. This work frequently overlaps with topics such as disease etiology and healing, as well as questions of the identity of “Shinto” in the premodern period. He is also interested in modern issues surrounding theories of religion and magic both in the West and in Japan.
Alex received a BA in Music and Religious Studies from Brown University (2015) and an MA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley (2017).

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Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Robert Hymes
Email: bas2260@columbia.edu

Benjamin is a doctoral student in Chinese History. He studies the history of science and technology and the military history of Middle Period East Asia (~ AD 900-1300). Benjamin hopes to use material historical methodologies borrowed from Archaeology and Art History as well as digital humanities tools, like GIS, to better understand the production of technologies like gunpowder and their transmission among the many states that existed in East Asia in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Benjamin received his BA in History from Emory University where he began his research on this period. This past spring he received an MA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University.

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Nataly Shahaf

Nataly Shahaf

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email:ns3050@columbia.edu

I am studying modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history with particular focus on the encounters between China and Japan during the late Qing and early Republican periods. I received both my B.A. and M.A. from Tel Aviv University. My Master’s thesis examines the nexus of Buddhism and Neuroscience by tracing the transition and transformation of knowledge along with the practical application of knowledge in relation to the changing social context of the time. I am currently working on the history of art production and distribution, and the visual presentation of religion and women, especially prostitutes. I am interested in the open-ended processes of collecting, printing, publishing, presenting and distributing of art in China vis-à-vis the developments of global networks of technology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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