Faculty-Discipline

Takuya Tsunoda

Takuya Tsunoda

Assistant Professor of Japanese Film and Media

Office: 416 Kent Hall
Office Hours: On leave for fall 2025
Phone: (212) 854-5040
Email: tt2101@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Waseda University (’02), Columbia University (’05)
MA: Columbia University (’08)
PhD: Yale University (’15)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3322 East Asian Cinema
EAAS UN3343 Japanese Contemporary Cinema and Media Culture
EAAS GU4122 Japanese New Wave and Cinematic Modernism
EAAS GU4123 Japanese Documentary Films
EAAS GR6400 Critical Approaches to East Asian Studies: Literary and Cultural Theory
EAAS GR8070 Graduate Seminar in Japanese Cinema and Visual Culture

Research Interests

Japanese cinema and media, educational and science film, industrial cinema, history and theory of audio-visual pedagogy, media archaeology, cinematic modernism, new cinemas of the 1960s, television

Takuya Tsunoda’s primary research centers on the interplay between institutions and media, technologies and socio-cultural practices, science and material culture, and representation and knowledge formations. He is currently at work on a book project about Iwanami Productions, which evolved from a major provider of sponsored educational, science and public relations films into a key player in the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan. Grounding his research in archival materials, he highlights the historical and theoretical intersection between media-based governmental and civic activities, cross-medial articulation of postwar academicism in Japan, and a postwar struggle over the legacy and meaning of cinematic modernism. Looking beyond the activist logic of political radicalism, his book argues that the crucial root of new cinemas in Japan resided in institutionalized audio-visual pedagogy and image-making practice. This project works towards new transnational parameters that relate the cinematic New Wave to a range of epistemic transformations and changing mediascapes occurring in the period. His recent research interests extend to such topics as various modes of reflexivity, children and media, the emergence of alpine photography and insect ecology, television documentaries as well as the relationship between diegesis and contemporary media cultures.

Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, he taught at Colgate University and the University of Chicago.

Selected Publications
“Taxonomy of Techniques: Visions of Industrial Cinema in Postwar Japan,” in Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Cinema (Amsterdam, forthcoming)
“Hani Susumu, Nouvelle Vague in Japan and Processive Cinema,” in A Companion to Japanese Cinema (Blackwell, 2022), pp. 612-638.
“The Living Sea: Okinawa, 1958 and the postwar media Dispositif.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 13:2 (Nov. 2021), pp. 99-117.
“Iwanami Photo Library and Natori Yōnosuke on Photography,” in Mediology in the Transformative Period: Reconfiguration of Art and Media in 1950s Japan (Shinwasha, 2019, in Japanese)“Index and Deixis: Jinba Isao and Polluted Water Karte,” in Images of Postwar Japan: Pollution, Youth Rebellion, and the Osaka Exhibition (Univ. of Tokyo, 2018, in Japanese)

Dominique Townsend

Dominique Townsend

Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Department of Religion

Office: 480 Claremont Ave Ste, Suite 103, MC 9610, New York NY
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11:00am – 1:00pm and by appointment
Phone: 212-853-5640
Email: dt80@columbia.edu

Background
Dominique Townsend is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism whose research combines historical and literary methods. Her interests include Tibetan Buddhist cultural production, poetry, aesthetics, dreams, gender, and translation. Her research is rooted primarily in Classical Tibetan texts, with an emphasis on the seventeenth-twentieth centuries. She teaches courses on Tibetan Buddhism and history, Asian humanities, poetics, new media, dreaming, and Buddhist approaches to death and dying. Before joining the faculty at Columbia in July 2024, she was Associate Professor of Religion at Bard College, and prior to that she served as Head of Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art.
Research Interests

Currently Townsend’s research is focused on a book about dreams and dreaming in Tibetan Buddhism, All this is Dreamlike, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Her previous books include A Buddhist Sensibility (Columbia University Press, 2021), and the co-edited, Longing to Awaken, (University of Virginia Press, 2024). She has also published a book of poems and a children’s book.

Sonam Tsering

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Sonam Tsering

Senior Lecturer in Tibetan, Director of the Tibetan Language Program

Office: 502-A Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 2:30-5 PM
Phone: (212) 854-0596
Email: st2931@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Social Anthropology, University of London

Classes Taught

TIBT UN1600 First Year Modern Colloquial Tibetan I
TIBT UN1601 First Year Modern Tibetan II
TIBT UN2603 Second Year Modern Colloquial Tibetan I
TIBT UN2604 Second Year Modern Tibetan II
TIBT UN3611 Third Year Modern Colloquial Tibetan I
TIBT UN3612 Third Year Modern Tibetan II

Research Interests

Tibetan Language

Sonam Tsering is the director of the Tibetan language program at Columbia. Sonam previously taught at the University of Michigan, where he also remotely taught students at Yale and Ohio State University, via live video technology. Originally from Rebgong (Qinghai, PRC), Sonam later lived in the Tibetan community in exile in India, founding and editing Bod kyi Dus bab (Tibet Times newspaper).

Online publications

Introduction” for the English Translation of The Division of Heaven and Earth – on the peaceful revolution of the Earth Rat year by Shokdung, Xining (unpublished yet, 2008)
“The Historical Polity of Repgong” (The Tibetan and Himalayan Library, 2011) http://places.thlib.org/features/23751/descriptions/1225
Translation: Clear Sky and Red Earth – A Himalayan Story by Sienna Craig, Illustrations by Tenzin Norbu, (Mera Publications, 2004)
“Ipolito Desideri” (Latse Library Newsletter, 2004)
“La dwags kyi ag bar and its background” (Latse Library Newsletter, 2005)
New York Regular contribution to Nyenchen Thanglha, Nor Od, Tibetan Review, Mangtso and Tibet Times, Dharamasala, India 1987 – 1993
Numerous Articles in Qinghai Zangwen Bao (Qinghai Tibetan Language Newspaper), Qinghai Fazhi Bao (Qinghai Law Magazine), Xining, PRC