Faculty

Sau-yi Fong

Sau-yi Fong

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
 
Office Hours: R 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.

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes

Alexander Kaplan-Reyes

Early Career Fellow

Email: ak3627@columbia.edu

Educational Background
BA: Occidental College (’11)
MA: University of California, Los Angeles (’14)
Ph.D: Columbia University (’22)
 
Research Interests
 Male-male Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality, The History of the Samurai, Historical Narrative, History as Popular Culture
 
Alexander Kaplan-Reyes is a historian of premodern Japan, specializing in the Warring States period (1467-1603) and the transition to the Edo period (1603-1868). His current research explores the intimate relations between male warriors during the Warring States and the ways in which such ties strengthened alliances and retainer bands, contributing to the process of unification that constitutes the era’s central narrative. He is also interested more broadly in the history of the samurai and the construction of warrior identity. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2022. His research has received support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Shincho Foundation for the Promotion of Literature, and the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture.

Filed Under: Adjunct

Allison Bernard

Allison Bernard

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Office Hours: M 10-12:00 PM and by appointment
Email: aeb2197@columbia.edu 

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University
MA: Columbia University
BA: Middlebury College

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts
EAAS UN3119 Theater/Drama Traditions of China and Japan
EAAS UN3114: Chinese Theater and Drama

Research Interests

Allison Bernard is a scholar of Chinese literature and culture whose research focuses on Ming-Qing drama, print and theatrical cultures, and intersections between literature and history. She is working on a book manuscript that examines the uses of metatheatre in and around Kong Shangren’s historical drama, Taohua shan (The Peach Blossom Fan). This project reveals the significance of theatrical media and performance practices for framing the political and historical valences of 17th century dramas and demonstrates how The Peach Blossom Fan’s uses of metatheatre serve as an innovative form of historiography (including in its treatment of Ruan Dacheng: a blacklisted mid-17th century politician and playwright, who appears on stage in The Peach Blossom Fan as a dramatic character).

In addition to her work on theater and performance, Allison is interested in questions about how media shapes the reading and writing of early modern Chinese literature. Other in-progress projects include articles on early-mid Qing autobiographical playwrights Liao Yan and Xu Xi, concepts of visuality and portraiture in Kong Shangren’s “portrait-poetry,” and the emperor’s role type in early modern Chinese dramas.

Selected Publications

“‘Making History’: Metatheatre in The Peach Blossom Fan,” CHINOPERL (Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature) 40, no. 2 (December 2021), 99-127.

 
 

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