Faculty

Lu Kou

Lu Kou

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Office: 412 Kent Hall
Office Hours: T 3-5 PM, appointment required
Phone:
Email: lk2950@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Peking University (2010)
MA: Harvard University (2012)
PhD: Harvard University (2018)

Classes Taught

EAAS UN3935 The Fantastic in Pre-Modern China
EAAS GU4031 History of Chinese Literature

Research Interests

As a medievalist and a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, Lu Kou’s research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, poetry and poetics, historiography, and comparative studies of China’s Middle Period and medieval Europe. He is currently at work on two book projects: War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, which examines the “discursive battles” fought among rival states in China’s early medieval period and investigates how rhetoric constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity; and (tentatively titled) Locked Seal, Heart of Poetry: Bureaucracy and the Representation of Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry, 400-900 CE, which studies the dialectic between poetry and bureaucratic systems, between the lyrical and quotidian renderings of “work” in medieval poetry. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bard College (2019-2022) and Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College (2018-2019).

Selected Publications

“The Poetics and Politics of Space: Writing Imperial Visits of Private Estates in Early Tang Court Poetry.” The Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. 2023. Special issue on “court culture.”

“Audible Empire: Musical Orthodoxy and Spectacle in the Sui Dynasty.” Early Medieval China, vol. 28 (2022): pp. 73-96.

“Epistolary Exchange and Psychological Warfare: Tuoba Tao’s 拓跋燾 (408–452, r. 423–452) Letters to his Southern Audience.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 7.1 (2020): pp. 34-59.

[Chinese version:] “Shuxin zhong de junwang xingxiang yu xinli zhan: Tuoba Tao (408–452, r. 423–452) de guoshu he ta de nanfang duzhe” 書信中的君王形象與心理戰：拓跋燾（408–452）的國書和他的南方讀者. Lingnan xuebao 嶺南學報, 13 (2020): pp. 51-72.

Yanwen Wu

 

Yanwen Wu

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 615 Kent Hall
Office Hours: MW 1-2:30 PM
Phone: 212-854-0660
Email: yw4033@columbia.edu

Educational Background

Ph.D.: Chinese Linguistics, University of Wisconsin- Madison
M.A.: Chinese Linguistics, University of Wisconsin- Madison
B.A.: Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Nanjing University

Classes Taught

CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I
CHNS UN3003 Third Year Chinese I

Research Interests

Chinese Poetic Tonal Prosody
Second Language Acquisition
Phonology

Yanwen Wu joined the Columbia faculty in the Fall of 2022. Her dissertation, entitled “Tonal Prosody in Recent-style Verse of the Early Tang: From a Statistical Perspective”, studies the poetic metric patterns of Middle Chinese and how Chinese poetic prosody was developed throughout history. Her dissertation was awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supported by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and was invited to present at several national and international conferences. She also published and co-authored several articles in the field of second language acquisition and Chinese dialectology. Before joining EALAC, Yanwen taught Chinese language classes at all levels at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to teaching, she also had a lot of experience in coordinating and supervising different Chinese language and culture programs at UW-Madison.

Kaidi Chen

Kaidi Chen

Lecturer in Chinese

Office: 501 Kent Hall
Office Hours: TW 2:40 -4:10 PM
Phone: (212) 854-5038
Email: kc3640@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD ABD: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies, University of Connecticut
MA: Chinese Linguistics, University of Macau
BA: Chinese Language and Literature (with Honors), Lanzhou University

Classes Taught

CHNS UN1101 First Year Chinese I
CHNS UN2201 Second Year Chinese N I

Research Interests

Psycholinguistics (speech perception and recognition)
Sociolinguistics (language attitude and sociophonetics)
Second language acquisition (L2 speech)
Language pedagogy (communicative approach and intercultural competence)
Open science and reproducible research practices
Data analysis and visualization

Kaidi Chen joined the Columbia EALAC department as a lecturer in the Fall of 2022. He works on applied linguistics in general. He has published (or edited) articles, book chapters and conference proceedings, and presented projects at regional, national and international conferences in many strands in this field. He is also an experienced language educator passionate about real-world pedagogical innovations. He is a core collaborator of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant project titled “An Engaging Digital Curriculum for Intermediate Chinese Language and Culture” from 2021 to 2022. His role in this project is mainly to work on the implementation of intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship in the Chinese language classroom. He is one of the contributors to the book Teaching Beginning Chinese Grammar: Communicative Strategies and Activities, published by Boston Cheng&Tsui in 2020. He has experience in all levels of Chinese language/culture instruction, and domain-specific language/culture courses (e.g., Contemporary Chinese Film and Business Chinese). Prior to Columbia, he taught at Allegheny College, Trinity College, and Middlebury Summer Language School.