Modern

John Phan

John Phan

Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities

Office: 620 Kent Hall

Current Course Office Hours: Thursdays 10am-12 pm (in-person)

EALAC Undergraduate Program Office Hours: Thursdays 10am-12pm by zoom: https://calendly.com/jp3720/ealac-undergraduate-office-hours

Phone: (212) 854-5744
Email: jp3720@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese
Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact
between China and Vietnam


John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken
language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political
realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues
of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnames Language,
focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard
Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern
Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary
Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad
issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical
issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple
languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically
diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website.

Selected Publications
“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.
“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.
“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)

Gregory M. Pflugfelder

Gregory Pflugfelder

Associate Professor

Office: 408 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 4:00–5:30 PM (walk-in basis), or by appointment (via Zoom)
Phone: (212) 854-5035
Email: gmp12@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University (’81)
MA: Waseda University (’84)
PhD: Stanford University (’96)

Classes Taught
ASCE UN1361 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Japan
HSEA UN3871 Modern Japan: Images and Words
HSEA GR6009 Graduate Colloquium on Early Modern Japan
EAAS UN3888 Cultural History of Japanese Monsters
Research Interests

Early-Modern and Modern Japanese History, Gender, Sexuality, Visual Culture

Gregory Pflugfelder specializes in Japanese history and gender studies. He received his A.B. from Harvard, his M.A. from Waseda, and his Ph.D. from Stanford. His books include Seiji to daidokoro: Akita-ken joshi sanseiken undōshi (Politics and the kitchen: a history of the women’s suffrage movement in Akita prefecture), which received the 1986 Yamakawa Kikue Prize, and Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. His current work engages the the historical construction of masculinities, the history of the body, and representations of monstrosity.

Selected Publications

“The Nation-State, the Age/Gender System, and the Reconstitution of Erotic Desire in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies (2012)

Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (University of California, 1999)

JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life (co-editor, University of Michigan, 2005)

Lydia H. Liu

Lydia Liu

Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities

Office: 406 Kent Hall
Office Hours: Wed 4pm-6pm
Phone: (212) 854-5631
Email: ll2410@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Northwestern Normal University
MA: Shangdong University
PhD: Harvard University

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3927 China in the Modern World
EAAS G8035 Lu Xun and Modern China
CPLS GR6100 Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society
CLEA 6120GR Race and Empire in the Asia Pacific

EAASGR6712 The Chinese Avant-Garde: A Political History

Research Interests

Modern Chinese literature and comparative literature, media studies, philosophy of language, and critical translation theory.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology.

Professor Liu teaches courses on modern Chinese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and offers graduate courses on comparative literature, critical translation theory, and digital media at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard UP, 2004); and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, Translated Modernity (Stanford UP, 1995). Her other books include Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999); an edited volume in Chinese called The Global Order and the Standard of Civilization (Beijing Sanlian, 2016) which appeared in Korean edition translated by Tae-Geun Cha (Gyoyudang Press) in 2022. Her co-edited volume The Birth of Chinese Feminism with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko (Columbia UP, 2013) is on the New York Public Library’s list of Essential Reads on Feminism.

More recently, Professor Liu has published the following articles/book chapters: “Wittgenstein in the Machine” in Critical Inquiry (Spring 2021); “The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime” in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2021); “Das Digitale in der psychischen Maschine “in Technosphäre (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2019); “Die Erfindung des Freud’schen Roboters,” Springerin, no.4 (2019), and “The Gift of a Living Past” in Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford UP, 2018); “The Battleground of Translation: Making Equal in a Global Structure of Inequality,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 38 (2018).

As a creative writer, she published The Nesbit Code in Chinese with Oxford University Press in Hong Kong that won the 2014 Hong Kong Book Award.

Professor Liu was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997–1998) and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004–2005); a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). In 2021, she was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences under the auspices UNESCO.

Selected Publications

The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard, 2004)

Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (editor, Duke, 1999)

Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (Stanford, 1995)

The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Feminism (co-author with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko, Columbia, 2013)