Postdoctoral Fellow

Yingchuan Yang

Yingchuan Yang

Early Career Fellow

Office Hours: Email for appointment
Email: yingchuan.yang@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (2024)
BA: University of California, Los Angeles (2016)

Classes Taught

HESA GU4882: History of Modern China II
EAAS GR6200: M.A. Workshop in East Asian History

Research Interests

Yingchuan Yang is an Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. With broad interests in modern Chinese history, he works at the intersection of knowledge (often in the form of science and technology), culture, and politics in modern China. He is preparing a book manuscript, Revolution on the Air: Radio and the Mass Technology of Chinese Socialism, that offers a new understanding of Chinese socialism as a mass technological project. By investigating the state-sponsored popularization of radio technology and expertise as well as its unexpected consequences from the 1950s to the 1980s, this book will be one of the first monographs on the history of technology in modern China. This project has been supported by a Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, and numerous internal grants.

His second major project, “South of the Sea: Transnational Migration and the Reformation of Coastal China,” places the economic and environmental development of China’s coastal areas and Hainan, China’s largest island, in the transnational circuit of people, capital, and expertise between East and Southeast Asia. Other in-progress projects cover topics such as astrology, weather modification, and a little-known campaign of annotating ancient Chinese texts during the late Cultural Revolution.

Selected Publications

“Connecting the Countryside: Radio Networks and the Infrastructure of the Masses in Socialist China.” Radical History Review no.147 (2023): 111–36.

Sau-yi Fong

Sau-yi Fong

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
 
Office Hours: M 2-4 PM
 
Educational Background
PhD: Columbia University
 
Research Interests

Sau-yi Fong is a scholar of late imperial and modern China, as well as a historian of science and technology. Her research focuses on the transimperial histories of industrial technology, maritime knowledge, and military mobilization. She is currently working on a book project that examines late Qing China’s naval rebuilding program to explore the politics of 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. This article, published in Late Imperial China 43, no. 2 (December 2022), received honorable mention for the quadrennial Zhu Kezhen Award given by the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Her most recent publication is an article examining the Guomindang’s student military training program from 1928 to 1937, which appears in Modern China 49, no. 4 (July 2023).

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, the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She received her PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University in 2022.

Hyoseak (Stephen) Choi

Hyoseak (Stephen) Choi

Adjunct Lecturer, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture

Office: 614 Kent Hall
Office Hours: F 1:00- 3:00
Email:  hc2963@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Mary’s University
MA: University of Toronto/Columbia University
PhD: Columbia University

Classes Taught

AHUM UN3830: Colloquium on Modern East Asian Texts
EAAS GU4150: Childhoods in Modern Japanese Literature

Research Interests

Modern Japanese Literature, Publishing Culture, Childhood, Social Theory, Translation

Stephen Choi received his PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia
University in May, 2024. His research focuses on the diverse iterations of “childhood” that is represented
in literary works, as well as the role that the idea of “childhood” plays in the production, distribution,
and reception of texts. Exploring the many social and political functions of childhood utilized for
legitimating ideologies, proliferating propaganda, and promoting policies, the research aims to gain a
deeper understanding of existing socio-political narratives and consider possible future narratives that
can serve to protect actual children. He is currently working on book projects in both English and
Japanese.