core faculty

Ying Qian

ying_qianYing Qian

Associate Professor

Office: 930 IAB
Office Hours: F 4 PM-6 PM, Appointment required

Phone: (212)854-5027
Email: yq2189@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Harvard University
MPhil: University of Cambridge, UK
PhD: Harvard University (’13)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3322 East Asian Cinema
EAAS GU4572 Chinese Documentary Cinema
EAAS GR8998 Media Cultures in China

Research Interests

Chinese-language cinema and media; transnational media histories; media of activism, reform
and critique; media ecology and knowledge formation
As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media and mediation in
shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms of experience. Her first
book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia
University Press, 2024) excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s
revolutionary movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political
campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches documentary as an
“eventful medium,” and as a prism to examine the mutual constitution of media and revolution:
how revolutionary movements gave rise to specific media practices, and how these media
practices in turn contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. She’s now
working on a new monograph on media and the ecologies of knowledge in China’s reform and
opening. Ying Qian’s articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, China
Perspectives, New Literary History of Modern China, Oxford Handbook of Chinese
Cinemas, and other journals and websites. At Columbia, she teaches classes on East Asian
cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of science and technology, and
comparative media theory and history. Drawing from her experiences in filmmaking, she has
incorporated creative assignments in her classes, guiding students to try their hands on media
productions.

Selected Publications

Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia
University Press, 2024)

“When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap
Forward”, Critical Inquiry (Spring 2020).

“The Spectre of Liu Shaoqi,” in A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017)
“Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets, and the Reconstruction of an Activist Cinema,”
in China’s iGeneration: Filmmakers, Films and Audiences in a New Media Age (Continuum,
2014)

“Power in the Frame: Independent Documentary in China,” The New Left Review (2012)

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)