Nicholas Bartlett

Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese
Culture and Society, Barnard College

Office: 321-A Milbank Hall Barnard College
Office Hours: W 10-11 AM/R 1:15-2:15 PM, calendly.com/nickbartlett
Phone: (212) 854-2125
Email: nbartlet@barnard.edu

Educational Background

BA: Pomona College
MIA: Columbia University
PhD: University of California, Berkeley

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3844 Culture, Mental Health and Healing in East Asia

EAAS GU4236 China’s Long 1980s (with Prof. Ying Qian)

EAAS GU4840 China and the Politics of Desire

FYS BBC1740 Approaching Trauma

Research Interests

Addiction and recovery, labor, civil society, psychoanalysis, groups and authority

Nicholas Bartlett is an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China (University of California and Columbia Weatherhead 2020), offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. His current research explores the introduction of group relations conferences to China. In events designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, everything from geopolitical tensions to intimate dreams is made available for attendees to connect, critique, and reflect upon. Fieldwork in staff and member roles at conferences and in visits to workplaces explores how the negotiation of meanings in and around GRCs contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond.

He did his undergraduate degree at Pomona College and studied and worked in international public health before completing his PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF. Prior to coming to Barnard, he taught anthropology courses at USC and UCLA and was a research analyst candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Selected Publications

Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China. University of California Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series, 2020.

“The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China,” positions: asia critique 26.3 (2018).

“Idling in Mao’s Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2018) 42.1.

Allison Bernard

MA Program Director and Lecturer in Discipline

Office: 414 Kent Hall
Office Hours: R 3:00-5:00 pm
Phone:
Email: aeb2197@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University
MA: Columbia University
BA: Middlebury College

Classes Taught

EAAS GU4031: Introduction to the History of Chinese Literature: Vernacular Fiction and Drama
AHUM UN1400: Colloquium on Major Texts
EAAS UN3119: Theater/Drama Traditions of China and Japan
EAAS UN3114: Chinese Theater and Drama

Research Interests

Allison Bernard is a scholar of Chinese literature and culture whose research focuses on Ming-Qing drama, print and theatrical cultures, and the intersections of literature and history. She is working on a book manuscript that examines the uses of metatheatre in and around Kong Shangren’s historical drama, Taohua shan (The Peach Blossom Fan). This project reveals the significance of theatrical media and performance practices for framing the political and historical valences of 17th century dramas and demonstrates how The Peach Blossom Fan’s uses of metatheatre serve as an innovative form of historiography (including in its treatment of Ruan Dacheng: a blacklisted mid-17th century politician and playwright, who appears on stage in The Peach Blossom Fan as a dramatic character).

In addition to her work on theater and performance, Dr. Bernard is interested in questions about how media shapes the reading and writing of early modern Chinese literature. Other in-progress projects include articles on early-mid Qing autobiographical playwrights Liao Yan and Xu Xi, concepts of visuality and portraiture in Kong Shangren’s “portrait-poetry,” and the emperor’s role type in early modern Chinese dramas.

Before joining EALAC full-time, she held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies, Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Columbia.

Selected Publications

“‘Making History’: Metatheatre in The Peach Blossom Fan.” Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature 40, no. 2 (Dec 2021): 99-127.