Faculty

Yuki Ishida

Yuki Ishida

Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University

Email: yi2182@columbia.edu

Office Hours: W 4-5 PM and by appointment

Educational Background:

BA: University of Tokyo (’06)

MA: Saint Petersburg State University (’15)

PhD: Columbia University (’22)

Classes Taught:

Fall 2022: AHUM UN3830: Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts

Spring 2023: TBA

Research interests:

Modern Japanese literature and criticism; the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan; translation studies; literary and cultural theory in comparative context; modern Russian literature and Russo-Japanese literary relations.

Yuki Ishida is a scholar of Japanese literature and culture whose research focuses on modern literature, criticism, and translation. She received her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Envisioning Literary Modernity through Translation: Futabatei Shimei and the Formation of Modern Literary Discourse in 1880s–1910s Japan,” examines how translation helped to forge and in turn problematized the literary-artistic values and evaluative criteria of the Japanese language reforms taking place in the 1880s–1910s. Focusing on the work of the writer and Russian–Japanese translator Futabatei Shimei (c. 1862/1864–1909), her project reveals the complex interrelations between translation practice, the formation of evaluative criteria for modern Japanese literature, and language reform—a process with long-lasting ramifications on the shaping of the discourse surrounding literary modernity. In addition to preparing her dissertation as a book, she is pursuing a second project, which extends her inquiry into the Taishō and early Shōwa periods (1910s–1930s). Its major focuses are the transformative role of translation in the introduction and impact of Russian literary and artistic theories and movements on Japanese aesthetic discourse, covering not only texts but also visual media, such as cinema. This project also explores the increasing significance of the work of Dostoevsky in the period, which was avidly translated, becoming a locus of discussion on what constitutes literary modernity.

Hayeon Lee

Hayeon Lee

Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Modern Vietnamese Studies
 
Office: 909A IAB
Office Hours: W 1-2pm and by appointment
Email: hl3646@columbia.edu
Educational Background
PhD: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MSW: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MA: American University of Beirut
BS: Cornell University
 
Research Interests

Feminist ethnography, gender, intersectionality, transnational migration, mixed marriages, labor, sexuality, selfhood, narratives, life histories.

Hayeon Lee is an anthropologist of Vietnam and Korea, who is also trained as a social worker. She earned her PhD in 2022 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her current research, based on three years of field work in Vietnam, focuses on the migration process and narratives of Vietnamese marriage migrant women to South Korea. She is presently working on an article manuscript on ethnographic research methods and intersectionality. 

Sau-yi Fong

Sau-yi Fong

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
 
Office Hours: W 2-4 PM
 
Educational Background
PhD: Columbia University
 
Research Interests

Sau-yi Fong is a historian of late imperial and modern China. Her research interests include the transimperial histories of military mobilization, maritime technology, and oceanic knowledge. She is currently working on a book project that examines late Qing China’s naval rebuilding project to explore the politics of military-industrial technological transfer from the West to China in the nineteenth century. Tracing the personal, material, and institutional networks connecting the Qing empire to the world’s naval technology, the project uncovers a global regime of arms production that blurred the boundaries between the arms race and the arms trade, secrecy and openness, competition and collaboration.

In addition to her book project, she has written an article investigating the career trajectory of Ding Gongchen (1800-1875), a Muslim maritime merchant and amateur military technologist in mid-nineteenth-century China, which is forthcoming in Late Imperial China. Another article examining the Guomindang’s student military training program from 1928 to 1937 is forthcoming in Modern China.

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the D. Kim Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She received her PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University in 2022.