core faculty

Theodore Hughes

Theodore Hughes

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Humanities

Office: 618 Kent Hall
Office Hours: WR 3:00 pm-4:00pm
Phone: (212) 854-8545
Email: th2150@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: University of California, San Diego (’90)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’97)
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (’02)

Classes Taught

EAAS 3215 Korean Literature and Film
EAAS 3217 Korean Popular Cinema
EAAS 4124 South Korean Film as History
EAAS 4160 Cultures in Colonial Korea

Research Interests

Visual culture, film, literature, cultural studies, history

Theodore Hughes received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His
research interests include visual culture, film, literature, and history. He works across
disciplines, with a particular interest in intermediality—the relations between visual and
verbal forms of cultural production. He is the author of Literature and Film in Cold War
South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia University Press, 2012), which was named
a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the James B. Palais Book Prize of the
Association for Asian Studies for the best book in Korean studies in the year of its
publication. Co-edited works include Intermedial Aesthetics: Korean Literature, Film,
and Art (special issue of Journal of Korean Studies, 2015); and Rat Fire: Korean Stories
from the Japanese Empire (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013), a finalist for the Daesan
Literary Translation Prize. He is the translator of Panmunjom and Other Stories by Lee
Ho-Chul (EastBridge, 2004; reissued under EastBridge imprint at Camphor Press, 2017).
His next book, Death Without End: Korea and the Thanatographics of War, is
forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a project that
approaches the South Korean mystery novel as a form of historiography.

Selected Publications

Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (co-editor, Cornell, 2013)
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier (Columbia, 2012)

Michael Como

Michael Como

Tōshū Fukami Associate Professor of Shinto Studies

Office: 307 80 Claremont
Office Hours: F 9:00-10:00am and by appointment
Phone: (212) 854-4144
Email: mc2575@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Harvard University (’85)
PhD: Stanford University (’00)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
RELI UN2308 East Asian Buddhism
EARL 9335 Graduate Seminar in Japanese Religion

Research Interests

Transmission and diffusion of rituals and deities to Japan, local religious traditions, urbanization and theological innovation

Michael Como’s recent research has focused on the religious history of the Japanese islands from the Asuka through the early Heian periods, with a particular focus upon the Chinese and Korean deities, rites and technological systems that were transmitted to the Japanese islands during this time. He is the author of several articles on the ritual and political consequences of the introduction of literacy, sericulture and horse-culture from the Asian sub-continent into ancient Japan. He is currently working on a new monograph that focuses upon urbanization and the materiality of performance and interpretation in Japanese religion in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Selected Publications

Medieval Shintō (co-editor with Bernard Faure and Iyanaga Nobumi, 2010)

Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (University of Hawaii, 2009)

Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual and Violence in the Formation of Japanese Buddhism (Oxford University, 2008)

 

Nicholas Bartlett

Nicholas Bartlett

Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese
Culture and Society, Barnard College

Office: 321-A Milbank Hall Barnard College
Office Hours: W 10-11 AM/R 1:15-2:15 PM, calendly.com/nickbartlett
Phone: (212) 854-2125
Email: nbartlet@barnard.edu

Educational Background

BA: Pomona College
MIA: Columbia University
PhD: University of California, Berkeley

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3844 Culture, Mental Health and Healing in East Asia

EAAS GU4236 China’s Long 1980s (with Prof. Ying Qian)

EAAS GU4840 China and the Politics of Desire

FYS BBC1740 Approaching Trauma

Research Interests

Addiction and recovery, labor, civil society, psychoanalysis, groups and authority

Nicholas Bartlett is an anthropologist of China with training in medical anthropology and psychoanalysis. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China (University of California and Columbia Weatherhead 2020), offers a phenomenological account of long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction in a tin mining city. His current research explores the introduction of group relations conferences to China. In events designed to provoke phantasy and conflict, everything from geopolitical tensions to intimate dreams is made available for attendees to connect, critique, and reflect upon. Fieldwork in staff and member roles at conferences and in visits to workplaces explores how the negotiation of meanings in and around GRCs contributes to imagining authority and collective life in contemporary China and beyond.

He did his undergraduate degree at Pomona College and studied and worked in international public health before completing his PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF. Prior to coming to Barnard, he taught anthropology courses at USC and UCLA and was a research analyst candidate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Selected Publications

Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China. University of California Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series, 2020.

“The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China,” positions: asia critique 26.3 (2018).

“Idling in Mao’s Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (2018) 42.1.