core faculty

Madeleine Zelin

zelinMadeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies

Office: 929 IAB
Office Hours: On leave 2018-2019
Phone: (212) 854-2592
Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Classes Taught

HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy

Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award (Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing China (University of California, 1984)

 

 

 

Zhaohua Yang

YangZhaohuaZhaohua Yang

Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism

Office: 310 80 Claremont
Office Hours: T 9:30-11:30
Phone: (212) 851-4147
Email: zy2200@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Peking University (’97)
PhD: Stanford University (’13)

Classes Taught

RELI GU4307 Interactions of Buddhism and Daoism in China
RELI GR6340 Chinese Buddhist Studies: Recent Publications
RELI GR9333 Mahayana Buddhist Scripture

Research Interests

Middle Period Chinese Religions, Buddhist-Daoist Interactions, Buddhist Manuscript Culture, Critical Theory

Zhaohua Yang received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He specializes in tantric or esoteric Buddhism in middle period China; but his research interests also include Chan/Zen, indigenous scriptures, and the interactions between Buddhism and Daoism. In addition to his training in Dunhuang and pre-modern Japanese manuscripts, he has done extensive fieldwork in the Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and the US. He is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Devouring Impurities: the Rise of the Cult of Ucchuṣma in Pre-modern China, paying particular attention to responses to transgressive tantric practices in the cult of this sole surviving Wisdom King in China.

Selected Publications

Unediting the Ucchuṣma Scriptures: A Contentious Textual History (Shanghai Classics, 2018, in Chinese)

“Ucchuṣma,” in The Brill Encyclopedia of Buddhism (Brill, 2017)

Gray Tuttle

Gray Tuttle

Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies

Office: 913 IAB
Office Hours: T 1:00-2:00, or by appointment
Phone: (212) 854-4096
Email: gwt2102@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Princeton University (’91)
MA: Harvard University (’96)
PhD: Harvard University (’02)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1365 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Tibet
EARL GU4310 Life Writing in Tibetan Buddhism
HSEA GU4720 20th Century Tibetan History

Research Interests

Tibetan History & Religion

Gray Tuttle studies the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examines the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory). His current research project, “Amdo Tibet, Middle Ground between Lhasa and Beijing (1578-1865),” is a historical analysis of the economic and cultural relations between China and Tibet in the early modern periods (16th – 19th centuries) when the intellectual and economic centers of Tibet shifted to the east, to Amdo — a Tibetan cultural region the size of France in northwestern China. Deploying Richard White’s concept of the “Middle Ground” in the context of two mature civilizations — Tibetan and Chinese — encountering one another, this book will examine how this contact led to three dramatic areas of growth that defined early modern Tibet: 1) the advent of mass monastic education, 20 the bureaucratization of reincarnate lamas’ charisma and 3) the development of modern conceptions of geography that reshaped the way Tibet was imagined.

Selected Publications

“An Unknown Tradition of Han Chinese Conversion to Tibetan Buddhism: Han Chinese Incarnate Lamas and Parishoners of Tibetan Buddhist Temples in Amdo, Zangxue xuekan/Journal of Tibetology (2014)

Sources of Tibetan Tradition (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

The Tibetan History Reader (co-editor, Columbia, 2013)

Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia, 2005)