Faculty

Tuo Li

Adjunct Associate Research Scholar

Tuo Li is a writer and critic from mainland China. He has written fiction and scripts for films and authored numerous essays on Chinese literature, cinema and art. He is the editor of several major Chinese literature anthologies, especially of experimental literature. His editorial responsibilities include influential literary journals Beijing Literature in the 1980s, Shijie (Horizons) in the 1990s-2000s, and currently Jintian (Today).

Yahui Anita Huang

Associate Research Scholar

E-mail: yah2109@columbia.edu

Anita Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. Her principal academic specializations include Chinese linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, second language pedagogy, and language for specific purposes. She has ten years of experience in building college Chinese programs and in teaching Chinese language, culture, and general linguistics courses. She also works as an interpreter and translator. Her current research interests lie in politeness in historical and contemporary Chinese and qi in Chinese culture. She speaks German, English, Mandarin, and Southern Min.

Dissertation
“On the Form and Meaning of Chinese Bare Conditionals: Not Just Whatever”

Selected Publications

“Chinese politeness and notion of face: the case of buhaoyisi,” Proceedings of the 19th Meeting of the Texas Linguistics Society, pp. 1-16, 2020. https://tls.ling.utexas.edu/2020tls/TLS19_Conference_Proceedings.pdf

“On the Practice of Cultivating Body-and-Mind: The Religious Significance of Zhu Xi’s Confucian Hermeneutics,” by Peng Guoxiang, translated by Daniel Coyle and Yahui Anita Huang, in Zhu Xi Now, New York: SUNY, 2015.

“Teaching Business Chinese: The Importance and Methodology of Building Pragmatic Competence and the Case of Buhaoyisi,” Scholarship and Teaching on Languages for Specific Purposes, pp. 110-121, 2013.

Courses Taught
Elementary Chinese
Intermediate Chinese
Chinese for the Workplace (Business Chinese)
Chinese for the Professions (Medical Chinese)
Reading Chinese Media
Conversation Chinese
Explorations of Qi “Life-energy” (in English)
How Language Works (in English)

Feng Li

Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology

Office: 422 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 4-6 PM
Phone: (212) 854-2510
Email: fl123@columbia.edu

Educational Background

MA: Institute of Archaeology (’86)
PhD: University of Chicago (’00)

Research Interests

Early Chinese Archaeology, Bronze-Age Cultures, Early Imperialisms, History of Literacy

Professor Li received his MA from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He also did Ph.D. work in the University of Tokyo (1991). He is both a historian of Early China specializing in bronze inscriptions of the Shang-Zhou period, and an active field archaeologist. His past work has addressed the complex relationship between geography and political processes in the collapse of a prominent Bronze-Age state, and the performance of the earliest bureaucracy in China and the nature of the early Chinese state. Professor Li’s work engages both epigraphic-textual and material evidence and offers question-led interpretations of Bronze-Age society and culture in comparative frameworks. He directed Columbia’s first archaeological field project in China in 2006-2011. In recent years, he is undertaking the writing of the Economic History of Late Bronze-Age China (ca. 1000-500 BC). He founded and co-chaired the Columbia Early China Seminar in 2002-2012, and is co-editor of Tang Center Series in Early China. See his personal website for a fuller list of publications.

Selected English (and bilingual) language Publications:

Guicheng: A Study of the Formation of States on the Jiaodong Peninsula in Late Bronze-Age China, 1000-500 BCE (chief co-editor, Science Press, 2018).

Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, 2014)

Writing and Literacy in Early China (co-editor; UW Press, 2013)

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China: Governing the Western Zhou (Cambridge, 2008)

Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045-771 BC (Cambridge, 2006)