Faculty

JM Chris Chang

JM Chris Chang

Lecturer, Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities

Office: 303 Heyman Center
Office Hours: F 1:00- 3:00
Email:  jcc2174@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Amherst College
MA/MSc: Columbia University/London School of Economics
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1359 Intro to East Asian Civ: China
EEAS UN3971 Technology and Power in Modern China

Research Interests

Socialism, bureaucracy, knowledge production, material culture, the archive

JM Chris Chang is a historian of modern China, having received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2018. His research focuses on issues of bureaucracy, archive, surveillance, and political culture in 20th century China. His current project is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork as understood through the dossier system, the socialist institution of comprehensive files on individual Chinese subjects. The project examines how the paper routines of the dossier consumed the bureaucratic profession and became the material for everyday political acts. His work utilizes what are known in the field as ‘garbage sources’–files previously discarded from official archives that have since resurfaced in book and paper markets. The use of this sourcebase has informed a broader interest in the material culture and afterlife of government paper. His research has received support from the Social Science Research Council and the ACLS/Mellon Foundation.

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.